


How to Come Ashore

by rosepetalfall



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Amputation, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-09-17 19:02:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 36,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9338771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosepetalfall/pseuds/rosepetalfall
Summary: “The Death Star is gone,” the doctor tells Bodhi.“Gone,” Bodhi repeats, trying to get his tongue and his mind around it.“Destroyed,” she clarifies.Bodhi takes a deep, shuddering breath in. He lets it out as slowly as he can, like his mother always said to do when it felt like his lungs were constricting from the in-pressing of circumstance. For all that the strangeness in his chest now is different, the lifting of some weight that had become so much a part of him, his mother’s words still help.





	1. Defector

**Author's Note:**

> As a trigger warning, Bodhi does undergo an amputation and receives prosthetic limbs. The fic deals with his physical and emotional recovery process after Scarif, but the material isn't graphic or focused on the amputation.

“Not my lungs! Don’t do anything to my lungs,” Bodhi says, his whole throat hoarse, like he’s just been walking through a sandstorm unprotected, and there’s so much pain it’s numbing, too much sensation for his neurons to process, or maybe it’s really that he can’t feel anything below his waist. There’re bright white lights above him, nothing like a sun. He grabs out or tries to and reaches nothing. He can’t concentrate, and his ears are pulsing with the echoes of sounds that aren’t there. He might be spinning. He could be anywhere but he’s not dead because surely being dead wouldn’t be so nauseating. “Jyn,” he calls out because Jedha City’s gone and Galen’s daughter might be little more than a stranger with familiar eyes, but that’s still better than only ghosts. “Jyn, tell them, tell them I don’t want that —”

“I’ll make sure,” her voice says, hoarse, too. Her hand might brush his — she’s in a floating stretcher, too, he thinks, or she’s a hallucination — but then there’s only darkness.

When he wakes up, he’s got two new legs. The left one starts half-way up his thigh, the right just above the knee. The synth skin is a little strange, but he can feel his toes. He falls back asleep.

It takes another four days before he’s conscious for long enough to have a real conversation.

“I am afraid the scarring will be permanent,” Dr. Yalthai, a Nautolan with wide, tired eyes and her head tentacles held back in a leather band, says. “I’m sorry. The injuries were severe and we were not able to treat you in time to address all the effects.”

As if scarring on his legs is anything in comparison to still breathing. Bodhi’s head is cloudy but he needs to know before he’s swallowed up by the haze, so he rasps, “The plans.”

Dr. Yalthai looks at him and then away and says nothing. Bodhi tumbles back into sleep, plagued by nightmares of continents crumbling.

The nightmares become real again, the next time Bodhi’s awake enough to be told news. Cassian comes by, confined to a floating assistive chair. With solemn, dark eyes, he says that Alderaan died, though he doesn’t phrase it quite like that. _The Jewel of the Core_ , Bodhi thinks nonsensically, some tourist tagline he must have heard. He can’t tell if he’s actually conscious or not but he doesn’t think his mind could’ve come up with this or maybe it could — he and his mind aren’t well acquainted these days.

The following day, Dr. Yalthai comes in and she helps Bodhi sit up. Beyond the med wing, there are sounds of running footsteps and voices lifted, but no alert sirens.

“What happened?” Bodhi croaks.

“The princess is back,” she says.  

“Who?” Bodhi asks muzzily.

“The princess of Alderaan,” Yalthai replies, her head tentacles falling free over her back. “She has the plans you stole!”

For the first time since his home and the most holy temple went to debris around him, Bodhi cries. Heavy, gasping sobs that strain the lungs he still has.

Time unfolds oddly for the next while, filled with battle sirens and the pounding of soldiers’ footsteps and the anticipatory whine of spacecrafts lifting off. The med wing is busy, preparing for casualties. Though some med droids come and go, testing his new reflexes, Bodhi does not see Dr. Yalthai again until she comes back hours or even a day later.

“The Death Star is gone,” she tells Bodhi. She is as neatly attired as ever.

“Gone,” Bodhi repeats, trying to get his tongue and his mind around it.

“Destroyed,” she clarifies.

Bodhi takes a deep, shuddering breath in. He lets it out as slowly as he can, like his mother always said to do when it felt like his lungs were constricting from the in-pressing of circumstance. For all that the strangeness in his chest now is different, the lifting of some weight that had become so much a part of him, his mother’s words still help.

“I think,” Dr. Yalthai says, “today, you should try to stand.”

* * *

After (the destruction, the battle, the return), there is a ceremony. Rebel Command would like the Rogue One crew to attend — there are medals of valor awaiting them.

“Do I — do we have to?” Bodhi asks Cassian. He and Baze are the only surviving team members who are really mobile, though even with what little medical training Bodhi’s got, he’s pretty sure Cassian shouldn’t be trying to walk —- the burns are much less severe on his legs but they’re there and he’s got the blaster wound, too. Cassian’s footsteps are slow and heavy, a med droid hovering besides him, and his eyebrows furrow minutely every time he shifts in his chair. His arms are still covered over in bandages.

“These are not orders,” Cassian says, shaking his head. “There will be a medal for you regardless.”

“Oh,” Bodhi says. He scratches at his neck, wishes he had an engine to fix or a flight system to check over. “If it’s all the same then, I don’t really think —”

Cassian nods.

The bustling human medic who comes through to check on Bodhi as the jungle night sets in says the ceremony was beautiful and the princess looked as proud and commanding as her father had been.  

Cassian brings by a small box and sets it down on the table by Bodhi’s bunk the next day.

“How was it?” Bodhi asks, not out of any real curiosity, but because Cassian’s lingering and frowning.

“I didn’t go,” Cassian says. He shook his head. “But I saw the boy at night, coming in here to the med wing. Trouble sleeping, perhaps.” He trails off at the end into something close to a speculative murmur, so Bodhi’s barely following him.

“Sorry, who?” Bodhi asks.

“The pilot who hit the reactor. The son of a Jedi, they’re saying.” Cassian’s eyes are distant.

“Really?” Bodhi asks, his eyebrows flying up in automatic surprise. That seems impossible — Jedha knew the loss of the Jedi Order more intimately than most planets and their absence had haunted the Temple, for all that it had never been theirs.

 _The Jedi and us, we were kin to one another in our own way,_ his mother had whispered to him during the long, chilly desert nights of his childhood, and when she started that way, Bodhi always knew she was about to unspool the best stories, the ones that would sweep through his dreams for weeks. His mother, like Schezadah and her endless stories, keeping the Path alive for another night and another with her words.  

“It’s impossible to confirm, especially without General Kenobi, and the pilot himself didn’t know until lately. They must have been trying to hide him from the Inquisitors,” Cassian says. “But with that shot? Yes, I believe it.”

* * *

It’s nine standard days after the Death Star’s blown up — Cassian said that Imperial troops are calling it the battle at Yavin, just like the Rebels are, an understatement of star-system-sized proportions on both sides. It’s nine days after Galen’s monster exploded into debris and Bodhi’s sitting and staring out the window of the medical wing, swallowed by such a deep state of boredom that the sway of the rainforest canopy (he’s really only ever seen rainforests in passing before, at the edges of shuttle bays) is bizarrely mesmerizing. He doesn’t know how to ask for something to read, and Cassian had found him a card deck but after years of playing against himself, Bodhi rarely surprises himself anymore.

That’s when when a voice off to the side of him asks, “I hope you don’t mind a visitor?”

The voice isn’t Baze’s or Cassian’s and the Intel officers who have been coming and going now that Bodhi can stay awake long enough to answer questions never sound so tentative.

Bodhi turns and looks up at the speaker, standing in the doorway. It’s a blond-haired human and there’s no mistaking that face, really, when it’s the one everyone’s been talking about — some kid out of nowhere who might just have those powers just like everyone back home used to whisper about, dream about, pray for. He looks too young, too tired, too much like the clear-eyed nosy teenagers on the less-occupied worlds Bodhi’s visited, the ones daring each other to throw taunts or rocks from a just-safe-enough distance. He doesn’t look like a warrior; he looks like one well-aimed blaster shot would do him in, just like everyone else. It makes Bodhi’s stomach lurch.

The kid lingers by the door, hands stuck in the pockets of some ill-fitting trousers, his yellow jacket slightly too large (Rebel fatigues are a more mixed lot than Imperial ones, Bodhi’s learning), then takes a few slow steps in. He says, “Just — you’re the messenger, right? The pilot?”

“The pilot,” Bodhi repeats slowly. “I think that’s what people are saying about you, isn’t it? You’re the pilot.”

“I guess,” the kid says, looking down at the floor and shrugging. Bodhi wonders how much the bounty on his head is. Whether it’s more or less than the one on his own. “Call me Luke, though.”

“Bodhi Rook.” The med droid said this morning that it might help him to talk more, which kind of makes Bodhi wants to laugh without quite knowing why — right now, staying awake and out of the bacta tank for more than four hours feels like an accomplishment and besides, well before this, Bodhi sometimes went days without talking to anyone but himself and the stars and the transport control officers over the comms.

“Bodhi. Like the trees in the stories about the Wandering Ones?” Luke smiles.

Bodhi blinks. He knows the stories of Jedha have been carried out across the galaxy, but Jedha City’s gone and it makes his heart crack like ice to hear its echoes. “Like that,” he agrees hollowly.

His mother had been devout until death and so his older sisters had names from the sacred stories too. They’d failed to come home one day, almost nine years back now, which could have meant death or detention or smuggling themselves to freedom. Mostly it meant perpetual mystery. In Bodhi’s memory, they’re stuck at that no longer adolescent but still undetermined age when their faith spun like a top, wobbling but yet to land decisively on any particular opinion. He’d seen it, though, the way children see more than they’re intended to — the way that the occupation wore away at their capacity for prayer. Bodhi had prayed more and more — the prayers of the near-to-death, the prayers of the desperate, not the deliberate invocations of his mother — every time he came and went from Eadu, but he’d believed less and less.

“I always thought off-worlder stories were the best,” Luke offers. Bodhi wonders how long he’s been silent. Conversations are harder now than they used to be, before Saw Gerrera’s interrogation, before Jedha crumbled before him, or maybe it goes back further than that.

“Why?” Bodhi asks.

“More adventure, I guess,” Luke says, sitting down in the empty chair by Bodhi. “Or maybe it’s more interesting to hear about deserts that aren’t your own.”

“I don’t know if I ever felt like that,” Bodhi says, but he supposes he had once. To be able to leave — on an occupied planet, that in itself had seemed remarkable.  

Luke makes a little humming noise. “That’s fog, right?” he asks, nodding out the window. He sounds like he’s testing out the word.

Bodhi frowns. “Yes,” he says. “This is a cloud forest. Didn’t you have low-visibility situations on your sim tests?”

Luke looks over at him and gives a little smile, his blue eyes bright and warm. “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, they were pretty rushed and all but I just meant I’ve never seen real fog before.”

“Where are you from?” Bodhi asks. _Why are you here? What is it you think I can give you?_

“Tatooine,” Luke offers.

“Pod-racing,” Bodhi replies absently. The Boonta Eve Classic and Luke Skywalker come from the same planet. It’s fitting somehow.  

Luke looks over at him, quizzically amused. “Yeah, that’s us,” he agrees. “Although I never actually saw a race in person. You?”

“No,” Bodhi shrugs. He’d never bothered putting his money on something so unpredictably volatile and in the years of his long-haul trips, Tatooine only seemed to get further away, for all that Bodhi heard about the occasional battalion that had the misfortune of being stationed there. “Pays to know your races though.”

“Mmm,” Luke hums, with a familiar kind of immediate judgment. It reminds Bodhi of his aunties and his cousins, the sermons they could speak just by raising their loving, commanding eyebrows.

“You don’t gamble? You joined the Rebellion.” It isn’t sharp — Bodhi’s always found anger draining and he gets tired so quickly since he woke up alive.

But either way, Luke laughs. Then just as suddenly he stops, startled by himself like some darting animal and its shadow. “I guess maybe I do now,” he says and it’s quiet and solemn.

“You know sabacc?” Bodhi asks, because two-person games are always more engaging. It’s harder and more interesting to try to predict another person.

“A little,” Luke says tentatively.

“I can — I’ll catch you up,” Bodhi decides. “You’re a starfighter pilot, yeah?”

“As of two weeks ago,” Luke says. He talks like someone used to splitting up his time according to planetary rotations.

“Sabacc’s good for strategic thinking,” Bodhi says, parroting a line someone said to him once, someone whose face has long since melted out of his memory. It was when he was at the Service Academy maybe.

“Okay,” Luke says, shrugging off his jacket, getting comfortable.

Bodhi still doesn’t know what it is Luke Skywalker wants out of them meeting, if he thinks they have something in common through their relationship to the Death Star, but he’s quick enough picking up the rules of sabacc. His face is almost comically easy to read and doesn’t really get any more successfully guarded when Bodhi warns him. Still, it’s not the worst to spend an hour.

* * *

Bodhi manages to get as far as the sitting area outside their med bay accommodations entirely on his own feet the next day.

Jyn smiles at him, tired, from where she’s slumped in a chair by the only table. “Join me?” she asks, though Bodhi’s body is hardly giving him much of a choice. The new legs still feel uncanny, for all that they’re as smoothly-operating as anything a Core hospital could have provided. The synth skin’s got sensors and everything. The metal chair legs are cold against Bodhi’s new ankles.

“Thanks,” Bodhi mutters to Jyn, shrugging off the med droid’s hand on his shoulder. “I’m good, really,” he says to the med droid. “I’m just going to sit.”

“Very well,” it says. “I will return shortly for you when Dr. Yalthai comes to administer your second treatment for today.” Then it whirrs out of the room.

“That one’s a bit formal,” Jyn observes.

“Kind of a change from Kaytoo,” Bodhi agrees, gripping the armrests in an attempt to settle himself. “Uh, speaking of Kay, have you heard anything about how it’s going with — ” Bodhi trails off, not sure what the right word is. Repairs? Reconstruction?

Jyn shakes her head. “Cassian said the engineers are still trying to put together a structure that can hold the back-up memory files. He seemed a bit anxious that he’s not doing the work himself.”

“Then why isn’t he?” Bodhi asks. He’s not much for droid repair (or is it construction in this case?), for all that he’s handy with ship tech and comms, but he can understand the anxiety of placing someone you love in another person’s hands.

Jyn is quiet for a long moment. Finally, she says, “I think he’s worried his hands wouldn’t be steady enough just now.”

Bodhi chews on his lower lip, searching for an appropriate response to that and finding none. “What about Chirrut and Baze?” he asks, instead. “They in the bacta tanks or something?”

“No. They got taken for another one of those _debriefings_ ,” Jyn says.

“What do you think Chirrut and Baze talking to that council is like?” Bodhi wondered aloud. The Temple and its Guardians were always their own authority on Jedha, to the people, at least.

“More fun than sitting here, waiting to be poked and prodded, I’d guess,” Jyn replies. “Anyhow, I’d bet they’re just talking to some of Cassian’s people — the intelligence officers who do misinformation and all that. One of the medics just came and retrieved me from a meeting with some of them. They kept talking about finding a narrative for us. For me. We’re to be propaganda, I suppose.”

Bodhi swallows. “Like the, the holovids — a Rebel version of _Showcase of Heroes_ or something like that?” He’s sure his profile’s been distributed across the Empire by now, so there’s no point trying to hide, but still the thought of a holocam trained on him sends cold shocks down his spine. He’s made a point of not being noticed for so long.

“Possibly. The Council’s undecided about the best approach, apparently, so the propaganda department’s testing some options. I was told our mere existence is a message,” Jyn says, with a faint, wry smile. “I understand better now why they were having such difficulty getting in contact with Saw. He always thought the best statement was —”

“Bombs, yeah,” Bodhi cuts in.

Jyn turns her face away from him.

“Grew up on Jedha and all,” Bodhi mutters, flushed with some kind of shame he doesn’t want. “Checkpoints were always on fire. People admired his tactics, even when I was a kid. We didn’t even know what species he was or if he was actually one person or a code name but people wanted to be him.” And now Jedha City and the Temple and the irregular punctuation of explosions and firefights that had surrounded them, that made up daily life for nearly two decades, are all gone, dissolved into so much desert dust.

“He left me behind well before Jedha,” Jyn says, after a long silence. “Saw, that is. Two weeks after my sixteenth birthday. It’ll be nine years —” she pauses and gives a short, hard huff of laughter, “nine years in twenty days.”

“Then your birthday’s in six days,” Bodhi observes automatically.   

“Oh,” Jyn says to her hands, to herself. “Yes. I’ll be twenty-five.”

Bodhi lets out a kind of surprised chuckle, the closest thing to a laugh his throat has felt in a long time.

“What?” Jyn asks, face caught in some kind of confusion of surprise and offence and amusement. “Hard to believe or something?”

“No, it’s nothing,” Bodhi says, not sure if he still wants to laugh or not. “I’m twenty-five too, if we’re counting by Imper — Galactic standard.” Counting in Jedha’s time, he’s older, but everyone’s older on Jedha. “Galen did always say his daughter would be just about my age. Guess he was right. I’m — ” Bodhi does the mental math, “seventy-two standard days older than you. That’s close, isn’t it?”

Jyn glances over and smiles, just briefly. “Papa was very good with numbers,” she murmurs, which of course barely scratches the surface.

There are conversations they should have, Galen’s daughter and he, Bodhi thinks, but he feels utterly ill-equipped to convey to her what it had meant, Galen’s voice like shuttle bay landing lights in a storm, telling him it wasn’t too late to be his mother’s son.

Before he can even attempt to begin, the same med droid as earlier comes in for Bodhi. “Back in the bacta tank,” Bodhi sighs.

“You no longer require full-body submersion,” the droid say primly, though Bodhi had been able to guess that himself. Rebel droids are easier to tell apart than Imperial droids ever were, though until he’d been urged onto that stolen shuttle on Jedha, it wasn’t a skill Bodhi ever realized he was going to need.  

“Shall we say the same time tomorrow, then?” Jyn asks, the sardonic tint not doing quite enough to hide everything else.

“Uh, sure, wouldn’t miss it,” Bodhi replies.

* * *

Bodhi hasn’t done daily prayers in years, but of course his mother did. Each day for her was steeped in the Path. The kneeling, the gestures, the words, had been as familiar as the streets Bodhi and his sisters had played in, as familiar as the smell of milk sweets drifting out of Khadijah Aunty’s shop on their walk home from school. Ma had prayed for days on days before his departure. Prayed for something to go wrong, for something to stop him. _You are the only child left to me,_ she had said, _and you are asking me to let you walk into fire?_ But her pleas hadn’t worked. Bodhi had still boarded the Service-Academy-bound shuttle, broke atmo for the first time in his life.

It would have given Ma some satisfaction, maybe, for all that she’d wanted most of all for him to stay whole and unharmed, if Bodhi could say it was the Force that pushed him here. That it was the Force that got him to take that datachip from Galen and steal away to Saw Gerrera, but in the end, it had been the gnawing acid of guilt in his stomach.

And it’s guilt that gets him kneeling again. He’d never been to Alderaan. His old long-haul partner had once — snow-covered mountains that took your breath away, Thalia’d said, although she couldn’t have gone much further than the Aldera central spaceport. Still, the second-hand sense impressions have been haunting Bodhi.

And so Bodhi’s return to the Path begins with a garden, the way his mother’s saddest and most poetic stories often did.

In the morning, the day after he and Jyn discussed her birthday, Dr. Yalthai tells Bodhi in rather firm terms that he should try walking further, outside perhaps.

“You can tell us after how the joints are working,” she says. “And it will be good for your psychological state. You can look at some flowering plants. Humans usually like that kind of thing, don’t they?”

Bodhi grew up on a moon where flowers bloomed naturally only for a too-brief, always-awaited spell in the orbital cycle. Bursts of brilliant color would hug the ground, garlanding the roots of twisted scrub trees like fireworks. For all the many greenhouses tucked into the backlots and courtyards of Jedha City, nothing could ever quite compare to spring’s true, improbable work.

So Bodhi says, “I like flowers, yeah.” Mostly he likes the idea of going outside, breathing in the humid air, hearing the screech of jungle animals.

“Good,” Yalthai says, with a nod. “I’ll have Ess Seven-Cue accompany you.” She waves over a tall droid, not the same one as yesterday.

The walk out from the med wing is odd and not for the expected reasons. People keep pausing, mid-step, mid-word, at the sight of him and the droid headed out through the hangar bay.

“People are staring,” he mumbles to the med droid, though he doesn’t know what he thinks the droid will do. Sweat prickles at the back of his neck.  

The med droid — Ess Seven-Cue — says, “You are well known on base for your endeavours. I believe there may even be be a song.”

Bodhi immediately flicks his head up to stare at Ess Seven, waiting for a tell that’ll reassure him that this is just an improbable joke. Maybe it is or maybe it isn’t, but either way, Ess Seven has the advantage of only having one inscrutable expression to begin with.

“My hypothesis,” Ess Seven continues, “is that seeing you mobile will benefit morale. Do not worry,” it says, looking down now at Bodhi, “that is not why we are walking. We are here to ensure your muscular recovery.”

“Right,” Bodhi says, finally, since Ess Seven seems to be expecting a reply. “Um, that’s good?”

“We will continue to the garden,” Ess Seven says with a nod.

And they do. The garden’s a bit overrun, the branches of fruiting trees hanging low and inviting. The stone benches are old and moss-eaten. The structures here, Cassian had said, are so old even the descendants of those who built them are long gone. Baze is sitting on one of the benches, while Chirrut is cross-legged on the ground. The medic accompanying Chirrut and Baze, a short, cheerful-looking human whose name Bodhi keeps forgetting, waves them over.

“Look,” she says to Ess Seven, “I think the _azadirachta_ looks ready for harvesting. The Chief’ll be glad.”

“Indeed,” Ess Seven says, investigating a thin tree branch. “It will be useful to replenish our stocks.”     

“Come, sit with us,” Chirrut says to Bodhi, patting the ground near him.

“He’s going to pray,” Baze says levely, showing no signs of wanting to kneel himself. Bodhi wonders how he ended up a Guardian, among the last standing from one of the final generations of the temple-given.

“It’s time for mid-day prayers,” Chirrut says, smiling sweetly, though he is by far the most aggressively militant monk Bodhi’s ever met. “You’re familiar?” he asks, tilting his face up towards Bodhi.

“I, um, yeah, my mother used to,” Bodhi mutters, fighting the urge to fix his hair and then giving in anyway. They’d shaved a section off to treat a graze, and the unevenness has begun to unnerve him.

“Then join me, if you’d like,” Chirrut says, a simple invitation. He rearranges his legs so they’re tucked under him now and he’s sitting over his heels.

Bodhi thinks, without any particular connecting thread, of the scent of his mother’s hair oil; of the near-constant rain on Eadu; of the console-top knick-knacks Thalia had collected, even though it was against regulations to display any personal effects outside of their bunks.  

“I don’t know if I remember how,” Bodhi confesses. “Not the proper way. Since I left Jedha, I stopped. I wasn’t good about it before, but after I’d just, I’d only pray when I needed to ask for help.”

“That is prayer,” Baze says, unexpectedly.

Bodhi doesn’t know what to say to that, but then Chirrut smiles and offers, “You can follow along with me.”

Bodhi swallows and then nods. Ess Seven holds out a metal arm and Bodhi grips it, lowering himself to the ground. He sits back over his heels facing Chirrut, one hand folded atop the other, palms open, the old expression for honoring the Guardians and the Temple’s monastics. Despite everything, Bodhi’s body seems to recognize the motions, like they have been stored there. He realizes now that he had been afraid that these new muscles, his reconstructed mind, would make him a stranger to this.

Chirrut grabs the metal cup by his side and hands it to Bodhi. “Come, little brother, drink.”

Bodhi accepts the cup and holds it above his lips, tipping his head back to drink. He closes his eyes for a moment, swallows, and then hands it back to Chirrut, who takes a drink as well.

“Just as water flows and gives life, so the Force flows through us all,” Chirrut says, placing the cup on the bench next to Baze.

“In knowing this, we take our first step on the Path,” Bodhi murmurs automatically, finishing.

“We are one with the Force and the Force is with us,” Chirrut continues and Bodhi follows, stumbling to catch up. “Above and below; past, present, and future; between and amongst, the Path taught by the Wandering Ones unfolds. We who travel the Path seek the end of suffering for all beings, for we are united in the Force.”

When Bodhi opens his eyes, the human medic is looking at them curiously, head tilted slightly sideways. Her name, he suddenly remembers, is Una. She shifts her gaze back to the trees.  

“I want to do the mourning vows,” Bodhi says from his knees.  

“The mourning vows,” Chirrut repeats and nods. For a long time, he is silent, while Baze simply looks at them both. Finally he asks, “For whose memory will you be taking the vows?”

It’s the traditional question, but it feels like a chest wound. “For Jedha’s,” Bodhi says, his voice wavering.

“The traditions never say one person is responsible for mourning an entire city,” Chirrut says, resting a hand on Bodhi’s left shoulder.

“But I already am. Please, I have to,” Bodhi says, because he has no other answer.

Chirrut is quiet for so long that Bodhi’s gut churns with the possibility of being turned away.

“You know we weren’t trained as Disciples,” Chirrut says. “We weren’t meant to be carrying out these kinds of ceremonies.”

“It’s close enough, though, isn’t it? Isn’t that what they used to say, that it was the doing that mattered?” Bodhi asks.

“He’s right,” Baze says, flatly. “That is what they said.”

“Very well,” Chirrut says. “We will . . . improvise.”

“That we have practice with,” Baze says.

And so three days later, Bodhi rises early in the morning, just as the dawn has begun its faint red-gold dispersion across the day. Yalthai trails behind Bodhi, there to monitor if any of them collapse, a possibility she’d said was “obviously very low,” though she’s got a med kit on her regardless.

“D’you mind if I come as well?” Jyn asks, standing up very straight in the doorway of the med bunk she’s been assigned. “I’d like to get outdoors but they keep saying I ought to be supervised.”

“Fine with me,” Yalthai says, turning to Bodhi.

“Um,” Bodhi pauses, uncertain. “We’re doing a ritual, sort of?”

Jyn’s eyebrows furrow for a moment and then she says, “I could give you privacy.”

Saw Gerrera’s militia had been based in the old catacombs, Bodhi thinks. They’d let his mind be ripped out and stuffed back in and then they’d died crushed by the remnants of Jedha’s ancient splendor. Years before that, they’d raised Jyn, kept a promise to Galen until they hadn’t anymore. When Bodhi turned sixteen, he had one or two minor scrapes with the law on his record — joyriding on speeders that weren’t actually his, but nothing that made his ID light up at checkpoints. Mostly he’d been a child. Fatherless by then, yes, but still months away from the disappearance of his sisters. Squarely in the middle of a network of cousin-siblings, he’d been protected and tormented and coddled in turns. None of those facts are quite connected, or maybe they are and Bodhi’s brain can’t quite find how, but in the end there is this: Jyn is Galen’s daughter and Galen is dead. He died in the rain instead of the dust and somehow that had been just as intolerable.

“No, you should come,” Bodhi mumbles, gesturing her over. “It’s, uh, it’s to remember Jedha and you were there and — anyway, you should come if you want.”

“Alright,” Jyn says, smiling for a brief moment. It doesn’t make her look Galen at all. Somehow, that’s obscurely comforting, like a sign that Jyn might survive mourning her father intact even though some part of Galen hadn’t survived living without his defiant wife and lost child. “Then I’ll come.”

So they walk, side-by-side, through the med wing’s hallways, out through the hangar bay, with Yalthai following close behind. It’s a beautiful morning, misty and already warm, and the canopy is filled with birdsong, the call of animals. Bodhi thinks, not for the first time, that the Alliance chose a beautiful world from which to launch their war.

When they get to the garden, Baze and Chirrut (and Ess-Seven, lingering in the background) are both already there. Chirrut is sitting cross-legged on the ground, eyes shut, in front of the small fire prepared for the ceremony. Baze nods at them from a bench. He’s cleaning a pair of hair-cutting scissors and a straight razor. As they enter, Chirrut’s eyes open and he raises his right hand, palm open, to them. _No fear_ , Bodhi remembers suddenly, like the guardian gods and goddesses carved into the outside of the Temple.

“Good morning,” Chirrut says, in remarkably good Zubaana. It shouldn’t really be a surprise — for all that Jedha's royal dynasty had been out of favor from the moment the Empire was born, most people in Jedha City, including the many migrant-descended, still knew enough Zubaana to get by when Basic wasn’t enough. And Chirrut was a Guardian. As a child it seemed to Bodhi that the Guardians must know all the languages in the galaxy, with how they could comfort and direct all the pilgrims from their far flung homes. But despite all that, it’s still somehow a shock to hear his mother tongue again.

“Good morning,” Bodhi repeats back. The slick, strong consonants and the long, elegant vowels feel as warm and welcome in his mouth as sweet, steaming chai on a cold morning. Zubaana was a language singularly suited to poetry, his teachers had used to say, though it was less the poetry than the astrometrics of the old royal philosophers that’d caught and kept Bodhi’s attention.

But Jyn’s more interested in Baze’s sharp items, it seems, because she asks, “Where’d you even get those?”

Baze smiles, a slight, dangerous thing. “They were lent to me.”

Yalthai stares at the straight razor in Baze’s hand, her head-tresses quivering minutely, but only says, “You’ve done this before?”

“Many times,” Baze says.

Yalthai nods and replies, “Alright then.”

Bodhi unfolds the extra sheet Una had found for him the night before and spreads it on the ground. Then he sits down in front of Chirrut, mirroring him, with the fire between them. After a split second, Jyn’s cross-legged on the ground, too, sitting close on Bodhi’s left side. She nods briefly, and that gives Bodhi the resolve to speak.

“I’m here to take the mourning vows,” Bodhi says, swallowing. The better way would be to make the vow at a temple, the best at the Temple with the long-gone Disciples, but the followers of the Wandering Ones have always been adaptable.

Chirrut nods. “In whose name do you take the vows?”

“For NiJedha,” Bodhi says, using the proper name for his city, the one in the scrolls.

Chirrut nods. “For NiJedha,” he repeats and Baze echoes the words, sliding off the bench onto the ground with them, on Bodhi’s right.

“Here,” Baze says, handing Bodhi the scissors. “You have to start.”

Bodhi takes the scissors and his hands are steady. For all the irregular thrumming of his pulse, his hands have never been the kind to betray him. His hair’s tied back, so he reaches around to clip off his ponytail, laying it on the ground in front of him. Baze nods and takes over from there, snipping off what’s left at the top of Bodhi’s head. After the curving strands of black hair have fallen around Bodhi, into his lap, Baze shaves the remaining hair off with the razor, hands sure and unwavering.

Bodhi gathers up the fallen hair as well as he can. Jyn mutters, “Let me help,” sweeping some stray strands into Bodhi’s hand.

“I give this to the fire so that NiJedha will carry a part of me onwards along the great journey,” Bodhi mutters. He’d had to look up the words before he’d left the med wing, to be sure he had it right. “Just as I carry NiJedha with myself.”

Chirrut murmurs mourning prayers in Old Jedhikka as Bodhi tosses the discarded locks into the fire. Chirrut adds some crushed plants, offerings and a way to mask the smell. At the Temple, there were always special incense. Bodhi stares at the dancing flames as they eat away at the wood, his hair disappearing into fire. When the fire’s burnt low, flickering into embers, Baze pours water over it.

Chirrut smears the ashes in four parallel lines down Bodhi’s forehead. “With this, you are marked as a mourner. Will you hold the memory of NiJedha?” he asks.

“I will hold and pass on the memory,” Bodhi says, voice wavering a little, despite his best efforts. In his head, for just a moment, he’s eleven, kneeling in the Temple courtyard with Ma and his sisters, doing the mourning vows for his father. The stones beneath him had been smooth and cold, even though it had been edging towards what passed for spring on Jedha.

“Then rise and remember,” Chirrut says, clasping Bodhi’s shoulder. Bodhi almost can’t for moment, but Baze gets up and holds out a hand and Bodhi takes it.

Jyn stands up, too, brushes off some hair stuck to Bodhi’s shirt and then looks at him, speculatively. “That’s not such a bad look,” she declares.

“Uh. Really?” Bodhi asks. Mourning wasn’t meant to suit anyone.

Jyn squints consideringly. “Well, it’s not especially flattering either. But that’s alright. It’ll grow back.”

* * *

When they get back to the med bay, the doctors and medics are doing their best to pack up supplies — the majority of the base’s personnel and material are all being shipped off Yavin in the morning.

“Home One’s well-equipped,” Una says, “but there’s not much room for personal effects. We’re going from being double-bunked to bloody quads for some of the more social species.”

Bodhi nods to show he’s listening though Una doesn’t really seem to need the encouragement. She never tells them anything that could be deemed sensitive or even particularly important, but she likes filling the room with light chatter, like a particularly well-tempered streetside vendor who can also perform minor surgery.

“I’m just sad to be leaving my plants behind again,” Una says. “Not enough room in the botany labs for non-essentials, you know, and I can’t fit ‘em all in my quarters. Don’t suppose you might want some?” She phrases it as a helpful, hopeful question.

“Um,” Bodhi says, his mind flashing to the old family greenhouse, to Jyn sitting beside him in the morning, to the rain on Eadu. “Yeah. You know what, yeah, that’d be nice.”

“Brilliant!” Una grins. “I’ll give you the marigolds and the peonies maybe. Don’t worry, they’re awfully easy to care for.”

Bodhi manages to get away with only taking two potted plants in their biocases, murmuring something about not having any way to store them, which is true enough. He hadn’t taken much with him when he’d defected and he’s got even less now, so carrying anything is strange.

The next day, the medics move them and all the other patients out of the planet-side med wing onto shuttles and from there onto Home One. It’s massive, but still not as big as a Star Destroyer. It’s nicer, though.

Bodhi’s new ship-side quarters are just across the hall from Jyn’s and they’ve both hardly got any belongings to unpack. The communications officer he’s sharing with comes in only briefly to dump his things, nodding a greeting to Jyn, cross-legged on Bodhi’s bunk, and Bodhi himself, curled up in a chair. Cassian comes by a few minutes after the comms officer has disappeared.  

“We stayed longer than I expected,” Cassian says, leaning his weight against the viewport, the planet’s blue-green rapidly falling away behind him. “The Empire will re-group eventually and they will come.”

“Cheerful,” Jyn says dryly.

Cassian turns back to them for a moment and smiles. “We won’t make it easy for them, though.” He glances down at his chrono then, mutters what Bodhi imagines is a curse under his breath. “I have to go. Meeting the mechanics who are —”

“Helping Kaytoo,” Jyn fills in, brusquely bestowing kindness.  

Cassian nods and is almost out the door when he turns around. “Today, it’s your birthday?” he asks Jyn.

In the chair next to Bodhi, Jyn starts, glaring a little. “How did you know that?”

“I’m an Intelligence officer. We put together your file,” Cassian says, amusement dancing in his eyes. Smiling completely changes his face, Bodhi thinks.

“Well, yes. You’re right,” Jyn mutters.

“Happy birthday. May you have many more,” Cassian says, giving a little bow, like an officer at a fancy Core party. It ought to be kind of ridiculous but it isn’t. Bodhi’s never known how people can manage that kind of thing.

“Thank you,” Jyn says, sitting up very straight. When she doesn’t pay attention, her accent still comes across faintly upper-crust Coruscanti, like so many of the deck officers on the Star Destroyers.

Cassian nods, still looking at her, but Jyn ducks her head.

“Um,” Bodhi says, speaking just to fill the sudden weighted silence. “Tell us how it goes? With the mechanics?”

“Of course,” Cassian agrees. “I . . . I have great confidence in them,” he settles on.

“Good,” Jyn says firmly, and like that something’s been restored.

Cassian nods a farewell and is gone. Jyn picks at her nails and smiles down at her lap.

“Erm, talking about it being your birthday,” Bodhi says, “I’ve got something for you.” Levering himself up off the chair (it’s miraculous, really, how much easier walking is than it was even a week ago), Bodhi goes over to the storage space below his bunk. He digs out one of the biocases and brings it back over to Jyn. “Here,” Bodhi says, handing her the marigolds. “Happy birthday.”

“Flowers,” Jyn says, looking at the clear case with amusement.

“Yeah, that medic Una tried to give me a bunch,” Bodhi says. “I thought you might want one. I guess I could’ve tried to make a garland so you could pin it in your hair, but I was always really bad at it.” Jyn’s got a hint of a confused smile on, so Bodhi hastens to explain, “It’s traditional on Jedha, making garlands, for birthdays and all that. Anyway, it seemed like such a shame to pick them.”

“Garlands year-round though?” Jyn asks. “Isn’t the weather always too cold or too hot?”

“Mm, yeah. We’d grow things in greenhouses — I mean, fruits and vegetables mostly? But for festivals and stuff, there’d be flowers. To make things beautiful, remind us that spring would have to come back someday.”

“Well, in any case, I haven’t got any hair pins,” Jyn says, looking down. Then she shakes her hair out of her face and adds, “Thank you. Really.”

Bodhi smiles and gives a little one-shoulder shrug, picking at his second-hand trousers (he hasn’t asked where they came from but someone had clearly worn them before). “Yeah, sure. Figured neither of us got to bring much with us, you know.”

“You’ve set the bar rather high, you know,” Jyn says, with an exaggerated, playful disgruntlement that surprises Bodhi. “I’m going to have to find something really nice for your birthday, now.”

Bodhi laughs, still startled. “You’ve got loads of time, though.”

“Loads of time,” Jyn echoes and Bodhi wonders if that offhand prediction sounds as strange and hopeful and frightening to her as it does to him.


	2. Heron Base

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise, this fic is still alive! I fully did not intend for it to take six months (exactly!) to update again, but life and thesis happened. But now I'm back and hopefully there will shorter gaps between updates going forward. 
> 
> Huge thanks (as always!) to the wonderful [leupagus](http://archiveofourown.org/users/leupagus/pseuds/leupagus) for beta-ing and to [Dolly_Bassett](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolly_Bassett/pseuds/Dolly_Bassett) for her suggestions and wonderful cheerleading. I definitely couldn't have revived this without their encouragement.

They’re in transit for three standard days, until they’re deposited on another small, sparsely populated Outer Rim moon. Bodhi’s never even heard of the Chaladh system before, but the area they’ve decided on is striking, dominated by high hills and heavy, unfamiliar vegetation. The new base is on the rocky edge of an ocean, which lights up at night with twinkling bioluminescent microorganisms. The base isn’t finished, but there are dozens of prefab buildings already set up and maybe more importantly, they’ve got the landing bay done. 

“Welcome to Heron Base,” says an officer as they disembark and Bodhi takes his first breath of Chaladh Two’s sea salt air. 

Now that Bodhi and Jyn are both mobile and antsy and no longer housed in the med wing, they’re needed, Cassian says. “They’ll do their best to find you something that fits,” he says. Bodhi wonders what that means.

As it turns out, Bodhi gets shuttled into a cramped and not particularly well-lit office space, to talk to a faintly harried-looking officer who’s doling out assignments. 

“Bodhi Rook,” she reads off a datapad and then abruptly her iridescent blue-green scales ripple — in surprise, maybe, or something beyond that. There’s so many non-human species with the Alliance and Bodhi’s not used to trying to read multiple kinds of body language anymore. “It’s good to meet you. I am Captain Zali’ya.” 

Bodhi mumbles a greeting. Zali’ya seems to be studying him, like he’s different, marked off somehow from the others who must come and go from her office. The medics and doctors have treated them all with an equal mix of disregard and concern, so he didn’t know to expect obvious scrutiny like this. It makes Bodhi want to gnaw on his fingernails, a habit he still lapses into (unclean, his mother used to say, but it had reminded his grandmother of Asif, Bodhi’s youngest uncle, offworld somewhere, a mysterious non-presence who periodically sent credits back). 

Zali’ya starts out by inquiring about his piloting experience, moves on to the Service Academy. Yes, Bodhi did his standard two years, then an extra one to learn the ins-and-outs of shuttle mechanics and to do a secondary training course. 

“And your secondary training was in —” Zali’ya prompts. 

“Um, basic field medicine,” Bodhi fills in. 

Zali’ya’s three eyes all narrow simultaneously. “Was that . . . common for cargo pilots?” It makes her sound young. A lot of the people Bodhi’s met since that shuttle landed on Yavin have been young. He wonders idly if Zali'ya is old enough to properly remember the day the Republic abruptly ceased to exist. Bodhi remembers, though of course none of it had made much sense to him. He’d realized something significant was happening from the way all the adults around him seemed stunned, unable to tear themselves away from the holonews, leaving the everyday tasks of living forgotten in the wake of the Emperor’s self-coronation. 

“Pretty common, yeah,” Bodhi says. “Long-haul trips’re easier if you’ve got someone who can deal with whatever minor medical problems might come up. Saves sidetracking to a medcenter. And if we were holding something valuable and us or the escort got attacked or something, we could respond.”

Zali'ya shakes her head minutely. “I suppose that’s what they call imperial efficiency,” she mutters. 

“That was the idea, yeah,” Bodhi mumbles. He’d mostly done the medical training because it gave his mother something to be almost proud of, something that might get her to accept the credits he sent home without that shadow of shame. He’d been fine but hardly a stand-out in training and now, Bodhi’s not sure how much of his skills made it through the past few weeks intact. 

“Well, that leaves a few options. I’m sure you’ve realized, but we’re short on starfighter pilots. I’d like to arrange some sim tests for you. If you’re interested,” Zali'ya tacks on at the last moment.

The room seems to dissolve into the rain-darkness of Eadu, the zoom of X-Wings overhead. Bodhi had wanted in a TIE fighter once; the pay was better of course, but mostly it had been about the gut-level instinctive allure of their shrieking, improbable speed (and there had also been this: the furrowed, suspicious gazes that followed his family after his sisters’ disappearance on his back, the memory of his mother being hauled down to the Security Services station for questioning. Bodhi had found himself hating the Empire numberless times before Eadu, before the Death Star, but his fear of its infinite watchful eyes was constant, still present). He’s pretty sure most of the people he’d known who went on to starfighter academies are dead now. Statistically, they have to be. The numbers that shuttle-jumped among the cargo pilots had been bad. “We’re the lucky ones, really,” Thalia used to say, with that manic grin she got when she was using stims to stay awake through her shift.

Bodhi bites his lip, squares his shoulders, and says, “Alright, yeah. I’ll take them.”

The next morning, Zali’ya meets him by his quarters — he’s sharing with one of Cassian’s Intel officers, a quiet, serious Mon Calamari who invited Bodhi to play holochess and had solidly beat him in an embarrassingly short amount of time — and leads him over to one of the simulators. 

“This is Commander Brenn,” Zali’ya says, gesturing to a grizzled human man, maybe in his fifties. Bodhi wonders for a split second if he's a Clone Wars holdover. “He’ll be overseeing your sim tests.”

Brenn nods once, stiffly, regarding Bodhi with barely hidden suspicion. 

“Sir,” Bodhi mumbles. Brenn looks a little like one of Bodhi’s old instructors at the Service Academy, with the same graying hair and badly-suppressed anger held in his eyebrows. 

“We’ll do four runs, see how you hold up, and then move up to test runs in a real ship if it works out,” Brenn says. He hands Bodhi a battered starfighter helmet and motions for him to climb into the simulator. Zali’ya smiles at Bodhi and he nods back at her, quick, pulls on the helmet and clambers in. 

The simulator is close and constricting in a way real cockpits never are. Then suddenly he’s in the midst of a space battle, TIE fighters hurtling towards him point blank, and the sim squadron pilots in his ear are calling for back up, and he can’t keep his mind on track. It was like this back at the Service Academy, too. All the many possible outcomes, the dangers, the trajectories are suddenly crowding and overrunning his head, constricting his windpipe. Bodhi’s good with his numbers, his tech, his predictions, and it’s a fucking liability now. Now, when the Empire is coming for him, hunting him, has his name and his face splashed across the holonet, now when it’s only a matter of time — 

He dies. He’d managed to send a TIE fighter hurtling one-winged into a fiery spiral before exploding himself, at least. 

They start a new sim. This one’s a planetary battle, walkers everywhere and worse, there are ground troops miniscule below him, vulnerable and ridiculous. How can they expect to get away? There are bodies falling like the soldiers on Scarif and the ocean’s not the same color but it’s enough to make Bodhi nauseous. Before he can tear his eyes away, he’s hit, the Y-Wing flaps burning around him. He dies, plunging into a muddy river. 

“Maybe we should take a break?” Zali'ya’s voice comes from outside the simulator. 

“You need a break, son?” Commander Brenn asks, false sympathy Bodhi’s been too long a part of a military structure to fall for. He’s daring Bodhi to say yes and brand himself a coward, still tangled in the cords of the Empire, but Bodhi’s tasted the dying dust of his city, the Holy City. From the moment he’d taken Galen’s message, there was never going to be another way forward. 

“No, give me the next one,” Bodhi says. He’s sweating, weirdly hyperaware of the stubble just starting to grow in over his head. 

He’s back in space, now, just beyond planetary atmo and there’s a Star Destroyer in front of him. His sim squadron leader is telling him to go for the cannons, but it all feels so far away. Then a solid wave of rage descends over him, soundless and deep and utterly clear. He aims for the bridge, where the officers would be, and flies straight into it. He dies on impact.

“That’s enough!” Zali'ya says from outside. 

Bodhi takes his hands off the controls. He’s cold, suddenly. A second later, the simulator’s overhead canopy pops open. Bodhi clambers out. His heartbeat is shivering, off-kilter, like his blood can’t find a rhythm. Commander Brenn looks down, sticks his hands in his pockets. 

“I miscalculated,” Zali'ya says coming over to Bodhi, her voice soft. “I apologize.”

Bodhi shrugs, unable to keep eye contact. “I’m fine,” he mumbles, wiping his hand against a pant leg. 

“We can continue our discussions this tomorrow,” Zali'ya says. It’s gentle, phrased as a suggestion, but it isn’t one. She sends him off in the direction of the new med wing. 

She doesn’t follow him, though, so Bodhi’s not quite sure what it is he’s expected to do. His legs don’t feel shaky even though his brain is saying they should. They just feel perfectly functional, the same way they’ve been perfectly functional since he got them. There is absolutely nothing wrong with him, physically. And he can’t go back to medical, not right now, when he needs to breathe. 

So he just stands there, stopped short of the newly-constructed med bay, staring at the long grass, the sloping rocky hill that dissolves further on into the ocean. Imagines crashing TIE fighters hurtling fire down into the blue-green waves. The Rebellion picked a beautiful world to bring into the war and just now that seems a terrible, terrible thing. 

“It’s something, isn’t it?” a voice asks. It’s Una, sitting in the sand off a distance to his right, smoking. 

“Should you being doing that?” Bodhi calls back, startled out of his dizzy reverie.

Una laughs and beckons him over and Bodhi goes. There’s something easy to like about Una and so little has been easy since he stole himself from the Empire. 

“Want one?” Una asks, waving her rolled cigarette when Bodhi gets closer. “They’ll kill you, ‘course, but not immediately.”

“Uh, no. Thank you,” Bodhi says, sitting down by her on the coarse, rocky sand. 

Una gives a loose shrug and says, “Everyone in medical has a vice. Keeps us sane.”

Bodhi just nods, trying not to make a face at the smell of her cigarette. “Right, yeah.”

“You’re not much for smoking, I see,” Una laughs. 

Bodhi tugs his jacket closed against the slight chill of the sea breeze — it’s a little bit too loose and the sleeves hang past Bodhi’s wrists; he suspects Cassian got it directly out of his own closet. “It’s not — I’m not trying to judge,” he prevaricates. “I’m just not supposed to. Religiously speaking.” 

“Fair enough,” Una says. “Can’t fault you for that. Nela, our pilot?” Una’s eyebrows pull together and smooth back down rapidly. “Former pilot, I should say — she got recruited, started flying a Y-wing now. She always makes the same face when she catches me.” 

Bodhi frowns, sitting up straighter. “That’s who found us, right? Nela Sandskimmer? I remember her face.”

“That’s our Nela,” Una agrees, tapping some ash off her cigarette. 

“So, then you were there, on Scarif?” Bodhi asks, watching Una’s profile, the freckles playful on her cheeks. “I didn’t realize. I mean, you never said.”

“Yes, there’s two teams of us from the med bay who’re emergency medical responders,” Una says, glancing over at him with her very round brown eyes. “Me and Nela and Ilan Medinara, one of the physicians, that’s been my team. We ran one of the shuttles to Scarif. I wasn’t trying not to tell you.”

Bodhi scans the rocky expanse of the beach in front of him — pebbles black and faintly shimmering, ground down volcanic rock maybe; that was the kind of thing Galen would’ve known — running back through what he remembers of that other beach, the things that come back to him in unpredictable snatches. “I don’t . . . remember you, there. I only remember,” Bodhi frowns, concentrating because he _knows_ it happened, “being on the ground, and the pilot yelling something. Just her face. I couldn’t hear. It’s all fragments.”

Una hums, eyebrows drawn together and mouth downturned, bringing out the lines on her face. “You were in and out of consciousness, so I’m not surprised. It’s normal. Yalthai’s talked about it with you?”

“Um, yeah, yeah,” Bodhi says, itchy down his spine because he’s not sure he’s ready to talk about his brain, not right now, not when he’s just fucked himself over quite thoroughly. 

Una looks at him, chin tipped sideways, towards him, glancing up and down. “I know I’m off-duty and all, but how are you doing today?”

Bodhi means to lie, because he wants to avoid it, but maybe he doesn’t because instead he finds himself saying, “Not — not great.”

Una sits up, and turns so she’s sitting facing him, legs folded on the ground, torso leaning in. “I’m sorry if I reminded you of something you’re not ready to discuss.”

“No — no, it’s not that. Really,” Bodhi squints, trying to focus on the right words but they won’t come.

“Your legs, then. How are they feeling?” Una asks, gentle but probing. 

Bodhi shakes his head quickly. “My legs are fine. They’re always fine, actually. Probably better than ones I was born with,” Bodhi tumbles over the words. Una frowns, but the legs aren’t even the point, so Bodhi continues, “I just, I did my piloting sim tests today. It . . . wasn’t good.” 

“Not good in what way?” Una asks, stubbing out her cigarette against some pebbles. 

Bodhi contemplates the slap of the ocean waves. “Just couldn’t keep it together, I guess,” he says, rapping his knuckles against the jagged rocks and feeling the sting of it. “It was like — like I couldn’t help what I was doing. It didn’t even feel like it was me.”

“Can you tell me what it did feel like, then?” Una asks quietly. 

“Like I was frozen. Right up until the end,” Bodhi says, wishing desperately for something to twine around his fingers, “and — and then it was like the only thing I knew was how much I wanted them all to die, no matter what I had to do. And they weren’t even _real_.”

“Just because you can fly doesn’t mean you have to be a starfighter pilot,” Una says, measured. “We’re all doing our part.”

“I want to fight though,” Bodhi says.

“We’re all fighting, Bodhi. All of us here. Maybe some in more obvious ways than others, but the Alliance is more than just the starfighter fleet. We have to be, especially now,” Una says. “If you want to be here, then they’ll find a use for you. We could talk about it, if you’d like. Get some caf from the mess hall.”

“No, um,” Bodhi shakes his head, “I’d like to stay out here. Don’t really want to be inside.” 

Una relaxes a bit and smiles again. She doesn’t look like she could be more than seven or eight years older than Bodhi at most but she’s got lots of lines around her eyes from laughing. “It is nice to breathe atmospheric air after being cooped up so long with the Fleet, isn’t it?” she says, leaning over to pick up a small, seaworn shell and absently rubbing over its surface with her thumb. 

Three days is far from the longest Bodhi’s spent in spaceflight but it’s hardly news to him that not everyone is cut out for the life he’d chosen — the long, brilliant stretches of loneliness, the breathlessness of passing through nebulas so old and so beautiful that local gods had named themselves in their honor. 

So he only says, “Sure, yeah, it’s a nice place they picked actually.”

“Yavin was nice, too,” Una sighs. Then she shakes her windblown red-brown hair out of her face and says, “Well, anyhow we’re not here to whine, are we?”

“Er. Are we here for something specific?” Bodhi asks, glancing sideways. 

“We’re here to look at the ocean,” Una declares.

* * *

They’re sitting in the dining hall, him and Baze and Chirrut, eating their evening meal when a comms officer comes up.

“Would you mind coming with me?” he asks, with a genial nod to them all. “You’re wanted in Briefing Room Three.” Bodhi looks down at his food and sighs. 

“What this is about?” Baze asks, standing. 

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” the officer says and to his credit, he seems to be genuinely apologetic. “General Dodonna wants to meet with you, but he didn’t mention why.”

“Well, I guess we’ll figure that out soon,” Chirrut says with a smile. Baze sighs and somehow makes Bodhi less anxious about what yet another general might want from his brain. 

When they arrive at Briefing Room Three, General Dodonna is waiting for them. So is a glowering young human woman with an elaborate set of braids and her hands on her hips.

“Let me begin by apologizing. I didn’t intend for all of you to be summoned here,” says the woman, her voice hard. 

Baze raises his eyebrows slightly, then leans in and murmurs something to Chirrut under his breath. 

“Nor,” sighs General Dodonna, “did I. We simply thought it might be good for you all to meet. Your highness, you did say —” 

“I expressed an interest in their well-being, as I would express an interest in any of those who have been displaced and joined our ranks. I don’t need to be coddled, General,” the woman says, ice in her tone. 

“If I may,” Chirrut breaks in, with a smile, “it is an honor to meet you, your highness. The Temple has always remembered the generosity of the House of Organa.” 

“Your mother was a kind patron for as long as she could be,” Baze agrees solemnly. 

The princess’s eyes are large and stricken for a moment and Bodhi recognizes the terrible weight he carries in his chest written across her face. This is Leia Organa. 

“Yes, she always said — ” Princess Leia swallows. “My mother always said that one of her fondest memories was visiting the Temple before she became Crown Princess. She wanted us to go, before I joined the Senate, but the travel restrictions —” 

“Denied too many the chance to make pilgrimage,” Chirrut says, with an acknowledging nod, the kind of absolution only the Temple-given could dispense. 

“You were — you were the one on the ship?” Bodhi asks, trying but unable to keep eye contact. “The one who brought back the plans?”

“In the end, anyway,” Princess Leia says. 

“I’m sorry — I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. In time to save Alderaan,” Bodhi says. 

The princess looks at him. Her eyes are brown and wide, holding centuries of tragedy. Then she shakes her head, her looped braids swinging gently. “There must have been dozens and dozens of people coming and going from the Eadu development facilities. They knew what scale of weaponry was being built,” she finally replies. “And apart from you and Galen Erso, none of them even lifted a finger. Your timing doesn’t require my forgiveness. It’s everyone else’s complacency I can’t begin to comprehend.” Her hands are gripped into fists. “We can never let ourselves be caught so off-guard again.”

Baze shuts his eyes and drops his head and Chirrut nods, just once, firm. Looking at them all, suddenly Bodhi’s thoughts fall towards that familiar portrait of the Last King, with his sad and steadfast eyes, that stood guard over the shops and homes of the Old Quarter back home. 

The Princess of Alderaan doesn’t look anything like the faded images of the Last King of NaJedha, but Bodhi wants to believe her near-impossible promises anyway. There’s something about the blazing conviction in her eyes. She looks like she could order tectonic plates to shift and they would immediately obey. 

“We’ve taken away their planet killer,” Dodonna says, with a grim determination. “It’s a beginning.”

“A beginning, yes,” Princess Leia says. “I want you all to know,” she says, her words cloaked with the weight of a vow, “we won’t be finished until the Empire’s gone. We will not forget Jedha, just as we cannot forget Alderaan.”

“Then we know that we are in the right place,” Baze replies. 

“The Force is with you all,” Chirrut says. 

Princess Leia and General Dodonna both offer solemn nods in return, like they recognize what it means when a Guardian gives his trust. 

_The right place_ , Bodhi’s mind turns Baze’s words over. _This will be the right place._

“We’ll let you go,” Princess Leia says. 

Baze and Chirrut give her half-bows and turn to leave. When Bodhi goes to follow them, Princess Leia places a hand on his upper arm, halting him. “Please, I want you to know I meant what I said. There’s nothing for me to forgive you for. Without you and the team of Rogue One, the Rebel Alliance might no longer exist. In these days, that’s no small thing.” 

“If — if there’s ever anything I can do—” Bodhi offers helplessly. He has nothing to give her, but she is surely owed. 

“Maybe,” she lingers over the word, “you could answer a question for me.”

“If I know the answer,” Bodhi agrees, standing up straighter. 

“Can I ask what brought you to find Saw Gerrera?” Princess Leia asks. “Why risk your life? You couldn’t have known they would target Jedha.”

“I — I did it for my mother,” Bodhi admits, feeling like the ground beneath him is floating. “She died. A week before Galen Erso and I had our first proper conversation. I wasn’t keeping anything safe anymore. And she never wanted me to fly for the Empire anyway.” 

“She must have been quite the woman,” Princess Leia says. Bodhi wonders how someone who looks so young can carry all that and still stand so straight. 

“She was,” Bodhi swallows. “People on Jedha — they,” he pauses, trying to catch the right words. They don’t come as easily for him as they do to this princess, with her ferocity and her outreached hands. “They used to say the same thing about your parents.” 

“I never knew a pair of people better suited to leadership,” Princess Leia says, her eyes distant. “Or to each other.” Her smile flickers into presence for barely a moment.

* * *

Bodhi’s scheduled to check in with medical in the next morning. The med bay’s crowded with people who look like they’re having atmospheric adjustment issues — Chaladh Two’s air is breathable for almost all of the species on-base but it’s still thinner than Yavin’s was. 

“How are you feeling today? Any difficulty breathing?” Dr. Yalthai asks, walking into the room, eyes still focused on her datapad — she almost stumbles over the instrument tray on her way and that makes her look up, startled, her tied-back head tentacles swinging heavily against her shoulders. She rubs at her elbow for a moment makes a little irritated noise in her throat. “Sorry. It’s been a long rotation.”

Bodhi shakes his head. “No, it's fine. And I’m fine. Uh, this is actually closer to the atmosphere where I grew up than Yavin was, I think.”

Yalthai looks up at him, her wide, dark eyes swimming with sympathy, and blinks once slowly. “Good,” is all she says, though, before moving on. “And the leg reflexes have been working alright? No pain?” 

“Yeah, yeah everything’s good. But, uh, are _you_ . . . okay?” Bodhi asks tentatively. 

Yalthai gives him a wry, tired look and says, “Yes, of course. Just coming towards the end of a triple shift, I’m afraid.” 

“I thought that was against labor regs for humanoid species,” Bodhi says, frowning. There’d been a very young, very concerned labor organizer on Chandrila who’d told him and Thalia that. She’d said it all in hushed tones, like she was playing at spies amidst the bustle of Bala Memorial Spaceport. Bodhi had nodded politely — they were still waiting for the droids to finish loading and she was harmless — but Thalia’d just scoffed and pointed out that Essential Materials pilots like them were under special exemptions.

“Ah, well, I think you’ll find that Imperial labor law doesn't apply to the Republic-in-Exile,” Dr. Yalthai laughs, a little aquatic burble. “But this is temporary, I hope. We're just stretched a bit thin right now.” 

“Right, yeah,” Bodhi murmurs. He’s wondered sometimes, since finding the Rebels, how ready they really are for outright war with the Empire. On an Imperial base this size, the medical staff would be larger, have a whole fleet of assistive droids at their disposal. “I’m, um, I’m sorry about that.”

“We’re learning to manage. We must,” Yalthai says, efficiently running a scanner over Bodhi’s legs. “And our Chief of Medicine would hardly allow us to do less. Now we’re going to do some proprioception testing on the feet now, alright?”

“Uh-huh, sure,” Bodhi murmurs, swinging his legs up onto the examining table, still thoughtful. 

Yalthai selecting a testing tool and tells him, “Say when it pricks.” 

“Yeah, um, yeah,” Bodhi says, wincing at the sensation. “There, too.” 

“Excellent,” Dr. Yalthai says. “You’re making very good progress.” She sends him off not long after that. He hears her sighing, long and deep, looking at her datapad again, muttering into her comm, “Yes, you can send the next one in now.” 

Bodhi’s got a while to kill before he’s supposed to head back to see Captain Zali’ya, so he goes to the mess hall — adjusting to a new planetary rotation is messing with his brain chemistry a little and he could use some caffeine. He grabs a mug, fills it with caf, guesses when it comes to the sweeteners (they’re all labeled in High Galactic for some reason, and it makes him feel like he’s back in school, against his will), and then locates Jyn, lounging by herself at the edge of the mess hall, staring out the open door. The weather’s been temperate here, so far. 

“Alright?” Jyn asks, looking at her food, shrugging slightly and biting into the crunchy bar of . . . something — it’s from a new set of provisions traded to the base by the closest local settlement. 

“Yeah,” Bodhi says slowly, savoring the hot burn of his drink. 

Jyn raises her eyebrows, but doesn’t comment. 

“Edible?” Bodhi asks, nodding at the bar of food in Jyn’s hand.

“Actually not bad. I think it might be seaweed? Seaweed based?” Jyn says, breaking a section off the end. “You want?” she asks, waving it at him.

“So how’d your meeting with the personnel officers today go?” Bodhi asks, accepting the food. 

“Well, they were still trying very hard to find a polite way to say they want me to steal for them,” Jyn replies, eyes sparkling. “For revolutionaries, they’re awfully polite, aren’t they? It must be a democracy thing.” 

Bodhi chuckles, caught off-guard. “A democracy thing. Yeah, must be.” 

“Anyway, I finally just told them I’d be more than happy to re-appropriate Imperial resources for them,” Jyn says, “and they seemed pretty pleased.” 

Bodhi nods, slowly, and cautiously bites into the ambiguously seaweed bar. It’s not bad. 

“You’re going back to meet with them later, aren’t you?” Jyn asks. 

“Yeah,” Bodhi agrees. “I don’t think they’ve got any idea what they want me to be doing.” 

“You just have to find a way to line up what you want with what they need, right?” Jyn asks, and Bodhi tries to picture her as a girl on the streets of some backwater planet, scrambling for her next meal. All those years of survival, leading up to her body being pulled up out of Scarif’s sand, leading up to here.

“Una told me that the pilot who picked us on Scarif is going to join a starfighter squadron,” Bodhi says. 

“Good for her,” Jyn says, biting off another chunk of her bar. 

Bodhi hums in agreement, wondering if the swimming vision he has of Nela Sandskimmer’s face is a real memory, or one he’s made up since the doctors eased him back into life. In his mind, she has short dark hair and a shouting mouth, the words drowned out by the grenade still singing in his ears.

* * *

It’s afternoon, the blazing orange of the system’s sun overhead, chased by yellow-green of Chaladh One, when Bodhi heads back to Captain Zali’ya’s office. He’s carrying Jyn’s advice and an itch in his fingertips. 

“I’d like to begin by apologizing again,” Captain Zali’ya says when Bodhi enters her office. 

“No, you don’t need to,” Bodhi mumbles, sitting down on the shipping container placed in front of Zali’ya desk in lieu of a chair. 

Zali’ya nods, once, and continues, “Nevertheless, I should have thought more carefully before I made the suggestion about flight testing you.”

“Yeah, well, I, uh, I’m guessing I’m not going to be joining a starfighter squadron,” Bodhi says. He’s half-heartedly aiming at something wry, but Zali’ya just looks serious, maybe a little pained. 

“I won’t lie, with those sim tests, I can’t in good conscience put you on piloting duties,” she says a bit grimly. Bodhi maybe should’ve expected that but it’s still sort of numbing to hear. “I’m not saying that’ll remain the case in the long term,” Zali’ya adds, frowning. “You’re capable. We’ve already seen what you can do, on Scarif. But for the time being, I have to recommend that you remain planet-side and unarmed.”

Before the Service Academy, Bodhi had spent eighteen years planet-side and unarmed. And along the way his father — his father who’d carefully nudge Bodhi awake during dawn prayers and wink — had died and his sisters had vanished. He has not been a child for years now and he will not be made helpless. The Rebels can keep him out of the cockpit and they can keep him away from armaments, he can handle that, but they can’t ignore that they kept him alive. If they didn’t want the silent, shaking rage that hides beneath his skin, they should have left his body where it was. Instead, they’d given him over to Yalthai’s steady hands and capacity for minor miracles. For her sake, almost as much as his own, he won’t be rendered useless. 

And now, again, he’s thinking of her, and Una on the beach, and the crowded med bay, and Nela Sandskimmer who saved his life and flies a Y-Wing now. Whenever Bodhi’s seen Yalthai, she’s been serious and contained, defying the laughter-prone reputation Nautolans usually have. But today she’d looked pinched, clumsy with fatigue. 

So, instead of any kind of logical reaction to Zali’ya’s concise and damning assessment of him ( _unstable, risky_ ), what his brain comes out with is, “Does the med bay have a staffing problem?”

Zali’ya’s eyes all dart up at once. “Have you been having an issue with your care?” she asks quickly. 

“No,” Bodhi replies, stumbling to get his meaning out as rapidly as possible. “No, everyone’s been great. It’s just that I asked Dr. Yalthai how she was, ‘cause she didn't look well — and, uh, she said it was just that she’s been working back-to-back rotations, that everyone has.” 

Zali’ya presses a long, webbed hand to the side of her temple. “I can’t speak to the details of the med bay’s rotation staffing, but it’s certainly true that we weren’t prepared for to deal with the aftermath of two successive battles and our personnel being split up among multiple bases. Things are . . . perhaps a bit more difficult than we’d like, in many departments.” Then she gives a staccato shake of her head and her tone shifts back to the brisk warmth from yesterday. “But let’s focus on your options, shall we?”

“Wait, sorry, just — what about next time? Are they ready for next time? Because there's going to be one,” Bodhi insists because it’s true and they cannot afford to pretend otherwise. “The Empire doesn't just let people walk away, Captain. Yalthai said you're down to one emergency medical response ship. You don't have thousands of officers coming up through Academies here. If they die because you can't save them, how are you going to replace them?”

Zali’ya’s eyelids all lower and her scales look like armor. “We’ll find a way. I assure you,” she says, voice hitching just slightly.

She’s sad, maybe, and that makes sense — she seems young and she’s already a captain; she must have known people who died at Yavin and Scarif and Bodhi didn’t mean it like that. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Bodhi says quickly, gathering his resolve. “I just meant — I’ve been thinking. And just, maybe _I_ could do it. You know, be a medic? They need extra hands, right? And, and those shuttles, the med bay, they’re the only reason I’m here at all and I know some stuff already. Give me time and some proper medical training and I can be what you need.”

Zali’ya folds her webbed hands together and contemplates them. “You’d still need flight clearance for that,” she says, finally. “Medics have to be flight-ready case they’re called on to be emergency medical responders.” 

A flash of hot frustration swells up in Bodhi’s body and if he’d had anything in his pockets to crumple or shred, he’d be doing that. 

Zali’ya’s still talking though, saying, “Though you probably wouldn’t require it immediately. With things as they are, we’re not likely to get a new batch of shuttles any time soon, but the med bay is specifically looking for a medic who could be primary shuttle pilot.” 

Bodhi closes his eyes and takes a breath ( _dissolve like water into water_ ). Then he says, “So what would I have to do to get flight clearance?”

“You’d need a sign-off from psych, for one,” Zali’ya says. “And new sim tests. You’d have to drill emergency response protocols with your team, get everything within standard timing.”

“Alright,” Bodhi says, setting his shoulders. “So, I’ll do that.”

Zali’ya looks at Bodhi for several heart-pounding cycles of breath, her mouth pursed — skepticism or puzzlement or something else. Bodhi can’t tell, maybe because he’s looking too hard. Then abruptly Zali’ya slaps the comm on her desk. “Sergeant?” she asks. “Can you check when Chief Himghal will be in xer office and have time to meet with me?”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant replies. 

Zali’ya looks back up at Bodhi now, her three eyes all narrowed, her scales reflecting the light streaming in the window. “It’s not an easy job you’re asking for,” she observes.

“You’re fighting the Empire,” Bodhi points out. “How’s any of it an easy job?”

“We’re fighting the Empire,” Zali’ya corrects gently. “But you’re not wrong. And the med bay has been asking me to find them a new medic since practically the moment I approved Sandskimmer’s transfer to Gray Squadron. Let’s see what the Chief of Medicine says.” 

“Sir?” the ensign’s voice crackles back over Zali’ya’s comm. “The Chief says xe’s free right now, before surgery, if that works for you.” 

Bodhi swallows but nods at Zali’ya questioning lean towards him. 

“Tell the Chief I’m on my way with a possible medic candidate,” Zali’ya replies. Then she adds to Bodhi, a touch of amusement coloring her voice, “Time appears to be on your side.” 

“Yeah,” Bodhi blinks. It’s what he wants and it’s certainly something the Rebels need — they don’t have enough people to shrug off the loss of soldiers and pilots — but everything is unfolding more quickly than he’d imagined. 

Zali’ya and he walk across to the med bay, the packed rocky sand crunching under their matching standard-issue boots. When they enter, the double doors swinging open, Ess-Seven Cue looks up expectantly from the medic’s station. 

“We’re here to see the Chief,” Zali’ya tells him.

Ess-Seven Cue nods towards a hallway Bodhi’s never been down. “Please proceed.” 

Walking up the hallway are Yalthai and a saffron-colored Twi’lek, both in those familiar blue-green physician’s scrubs, having a conversation that involves a lot of multisyllabic words. Yalthai looks up and gives Bodhi a momentary quizzical smile, which he barely has time to return before they’re past each other, shoulders just brushing. 

Bodhi follows Zali’ya through the office door at the end of the corridors. There’s a whole set of windows and two spare chairs in front of the imposing desk, which makes this the nicest office Bodhi’s been allowed into on Heron Base. 

Behind the desk is the Chief of Medicine, thick-armed and reptilian, the leathery green-gray skin of xer head crowned by a whole row of dangerous-looking bone spikes that descend down to the neck. 

“Chief Himghal,” Zali’ya nods, “this Bodhi Rook. Rook, this is Chief Himghal. Xe’s in charge of all medical operations out of this base.” 

Himghal smiles, revealing curved fangs like the poisonous snakes on Jedha. Bodhi’d been a city boy once, so the only ones he’d ever seen up close had been in the old Royal Zoo, but still, it’d left an impression. Bodhi swallows, feeling suddenly vulnerable, prey-like. 

Himghal’s a doctor, though, he should be polite. He’d offer his hand to shake, but that’s a human thing, isn’t it? 

“Sit down, sit down. You are the candidate?” Chief of Medicine Himghal asks, cocking xer spiked head to the side slightly. “You are the pilot from Scarif.” 

“That’s me,” Bodhi agrees, barely resisting the urge to bite at his fingernails. 

“Interesting,” Himghal says, blinking a few times in rapid succession. “Please sit.”

Zali’ya gives him a subtle encouraging nod and so Bodhi does.

“I assume you have brought me someone with qualifications,” Himghal says, addressing Zali’ya now. 

Zali’ya smiles graciously and says, “If you’ll check the files I’ve sent you —”

“Yes, yes, it is here,” Himghal says, waving at her console monitor. Xe makes a low rumbling sound, reading over Bodhi’s lifestory at impossible speed. “So. You are a pilot,” xe says, turning back to Bodhi. Xer gaze is heavy and a bit unnerving, like xe can see into Bodhi’s veins. “But are you prepared to be a medic?” 

This is, Bodhi thinks a bit hysterically, not how the Service Academy handled personnel assignments at all. “Uh, well —” 

“He’s got training in basic field medicine, some experience in practice,” Zali’ya cuts in smoothly. “He just needs some more medical training and that the med bay can certainly provide.” 

“Practical training, certainly,” Himghal — harrumphs is really the closest Bodhi can get to describing xer tone of voice. “Because we have too many patients and not enough medical staff.” 

Zali’ya smiles politely. “Which is why we’re here now. Rook has a good amount of basic knowledge and you can train him to the med bay’s particular needs.” She’s a better debater than Bodhi anticipated. 

“It would be poetic,” Himghal says, staring at Bodhi again. 

“I’m sorry?” Bodhi responds, thrown off-guard. 

“You are saved by our emergency response crew. You become our emergency response crew,” Himghal lays out. “Like a rhyme almost.”

“Yeah, um, yeah, I guess I was thinking that you know, your pilot, the one who’s going to fly a Y-Wing. She saved my life. I’d like to be able to do the same for someone,” Bodhi says, fingers tapping anxiously on his thighs. “I guess you can call it poetic. I mean it.”

“On my planet, epic poetry is the highest form of literature,” Himghal says. “Also limericks. This is why Palpatine had my university closed down. He does not take well to being mocked.” 

“Yeah,” Bodhi says, taking a breath in. Swapping stories about the myriad ways, minute and immense, the Empire took hold is something he can do. “They tried to close all the religious schools in Jedha City. Worried about us fostering treason because we said the Jedi were like our cousins in faith. People just moved our classes out of sight, instead.” 

Himghal smiles, a small, sharp thing, flashing the curve of xer front fangs. “A little poetry might be good for us,” xe announces. “More bacta would be very good. But this I can do nothing about right now. So, tell me about your training.” 

Bodhi runs through the outline of his two-term course and then Himghal prods him into recalling the engine repair scrapes and burns he’s treated, the cases of flu, the time Thalia sprained her ankle, the nerve-wracking incident that’d ended with him resetting Ieri’s dislocated shoulder sitting on some sun-warmed anonymous Outer Rim landing bay, more luck and the kindness of the Force than actual skill. 

“All humans, then,” Himghal observes. 

“Yeah,” Bodhi admits. “It’s just that with Imperial recruitment —”

“Yes,” Himghal cuts him off. “Never mind. We can teach you more. Sometimes a little less experience means a more open mind. You do not think you are a divine gift to medicine and there are fewer years of indoctrination about what counts as proper medicine to knock out of you. But there are things you must understand.” Himghal pauses and Bodhi nods quickly. “We are not a military branch. We operate in tandem with the Fleet, not on its command. So long as you are one of our own, you will never be armed. Your orders will come from the med bay and our decisions may not always align with the Command Center.” 

“Fine,” Bodhi says and it is. Blasters have never made him feel safer — he isn’t much of a shot — but he thinks Himghal could understand maybe, his half-formed ambition to transmute his anger into vitality, something strong enough to knit bones back together and burn away fevers. 

“Good,” Himghal says, proceeding. “Now, the important things. We are not a proper teaching staff and we do not have the resources to do all the practice procedures you ought to. You may very well be thrown into real emergency situations before your training period ends. We cannot shield you from this, even so early on. And for that I am sorry. You understand?”

Bodhi swallows and nods, hopes the swoop of fear in his stomach isn’t written across his face.

“I have alarmed you,” Himghal observes. 

So much for a sabacc face, Bodhi thinks, pushing down the bubbling concern — is it arrogant, what he wants, to keep life cradled in people’s bodies? — but Himghal merely nods.

“Fear is fear, Trainee Rook,” Himghal says. “I do not judge that. But it will matter how you react to it in the field.”

Bodhi nods again, feeling a bit dizzy with Himghal staring at him. 

“You report here tomorrow at the beginning of first rotation. Who was the lead doctor on your case? Yalthai, correct?”

“Yes,” Bodhi blurts out quickly, as a wave of relief sweeps like rain over him. 

“You liked her?” Himghal asks, lacing xer fingers together.

“Yeah, she’s been wonderful.” 

Some of the ferocity in Himghal’s face softens — into pride, Bodhi’s guessing, and xe says decisively, “Good. Then I will have her administer some exams. We will find out what things of value the Imps taught you and proceed from there.”

* * *

“How’d it go?” Jyn’s voice asks, when he enters his quarters. 

Bodhi startles, clapping a hand to his chest. She’s by his nightstand, bent over the marigolds, which are still blooming, despite Bodhi’s indifferent care. 

“Bleeding hells, how’d you even get in here? Wasn’t the door locked?” Bodhi asks, rubbing at his chest. 

Jyn straightens up, turns to face him, and pointedly rolls her eyes. “I’m a criminal, remember?” she says. “But really, how’d that meeting with the personnel officer go?”

“Good?” Bodhi says, his heartbeat starting to return to normal. “I guess I sort of . . . took your advice, actually.”

“They gave you a ship, then?” Jyn asks, flopping down on his bed to sit cross-legged, unlacing her boots and dropping them aside. 

Bodhi winces. “Um, well, not exactly? But I’m going to make it happen. At some point.” Jyn’s eyebrows are drawn together skeptically now, so Bodhi hastens to explain, “I’m going to do medic training. Fly one of the emergency response shuttles, once they get a replacement. And I get flight clearance.” 

“A medic,” Jyn echoes. 

She doesn’t look like Galen but sometimes she sounds like him. Even though he’s dead and at his best, he was only a strange man weighed down by his own terrible capabilities, Bodhi still wants his approval, or at least the steel-lined assurance he offered that Bodhi’s conscience existed. 

“I mean that’s why we’re alive, right? Those shuttles,” Bodhi finally says. 

“Yeah,” Jyn agrees, looking at Bodhi straight-on, eyebrows still drawn together. “That’s certainly true.” 

Bodhi sits down on his bunk too now. “None of this has been what I imagined,” he admits, staring at his standard-issue boots. 

“What did you think it would be like?” Jyn ask smiling wryly.

“I have no idea.”

“This hasn’t really been how I imagined my month going either,” Jyn says. 

“Jyn,” Bodhi asks, tentative — he hasn’t known her long, despite his passing acquaintance with the ghost of her girlhood, the cut-off snippets Galen occasionally shared — “stealing things, for the Rebels. Is that what you _want_ to do?”

Jyn raises an eyebrow, a smirk playing around her mouth. “I’m a _thief_ ,” she says. “I’ve not exactly got a history of moral qualms about that. Besides, someone needs to do it.”

“Right,” Bodhi says. _Qualms_ , he thinks — he’s good at having those. He lets himself fall back on the bed, chest parallel to Jyn’s socked toes. 

“Thought I might go to engineering later today, with Cassian,” Jyn says, some time later, some time later, lifting the downy lull of silence between them. “See if they’ve made any progress with Kaytoo.”

“D’you know much about droid programming?” Bodhi asks. 

Jyn shrugs. “I know what it looks like when someone’s suffering sleep deprivation. If Andor’s not going to sleep, then someone had better make sure he doesn’t shoot a droid tech because he’s irritable, yeah?” 

Bodhi’s memory flashes to Jyn’s stricken, pained face on the rescue shuttle as she looked at Cassian’s prone body and he’s pretty sure that’s not all, but they’re all entitled to their armor. 

“You’ll let me know if anything new happens?” he asks instead. 

“Of course,” Jyn says, flicking her eyes sidewise, like it’s near-ridiculous for Bodhi to even ask. Then she observes, conversationally, as if it’s all the same scale of things they’re discussing, “Your bunkmate’s been gone this whole time.”

“Hmm, yeah,” Bodhi says, blinking slowly at the change of topic. “He isn’t around a lot. But he mentioned something about a partner who’s a mechanic? So maybe that’s where he is.”

“I wish my bunkmate would be absent more,” Jyn says, lips thin with distaste. “She’s some comms officer and she’s so aggressively _talkative_ all the time, like she has to fill me in on bloody everything. Makes me miss my prison cellmate. Respected my privacy, that one.” 

“You don’t like her because she’s . . . chatty?” Bodhi asks, a smile growing.

Jyn pushes at his shoulder with her socked toes. “She’s more than _chatty_ — she’s nosy.”

“Sounds terrible,” Bodhi says, aware he’s doing a terrible job hiding his amusement. It’s all so bizarre, to being have a discussion about such a mundane problem, when a few short weeks ago, the galaxy felt a different place. He should know better than to be surprised — he grew up in the minutiae of a disputed, blood-spattered occupation and there was time enough for boredom and petty squabbles there, too. 

“You’d better not mock your patients like this,” Jyn huffs.

Bodhi blinks rapidly, startled by the eminent futurity of that thought. Then he gathers himself and quietly says, “I’m not, though. Mocking you."

“I . . . yeah,” Jyn says. After a few beats, she adds, “I know that.” 

Maybe it doesn’t make sense, the way it feels like the Force meant something by bringing them all together, but Bodhi was raised to believe in the signs, and he believes Jyn now like he believed her when she was calling for them all to stand up. 

“Alright,” Bodhi answers her. Jyn smiles, just a shadow of a thing, and rests her chin on her folded arms, looking up and out the bunk’s single window. Bodhi turns his head to look, too, the warmth of the shaft of sunlight cutting diagonally across his chest to fall on Jyn’s knees and face. 

The sun and Chaladh One are sinking down toward the ocean, flooding it with color. And they are both alive to see it.


	3. Steady Hands

Jyn slipped out minutes ago, off to find Cassian, and Bodhi’s still staring at the brilliance of sun’s reflection in the ocean. _Sundown, time for prayer_. His brain still makes the connection automatically, even though for years he’s prayed only sporadically, only in desperation. It’s sundown and his mother would want him to pray, to hold with the strange fact of living and thank the Force. So Bodhi sits up, blinking away the red-orange of the sunset from under his eyelids, and shrugs on his too-large jacket, makes his way down to the rocky shore.

He figures somewhere on base, Baze and Chirrut will be settling in for their own usual routine, but just now, the beach is where Bodhi wants to do prayers. For all the many oceans and lakes and seas Bodhi has seen, there is something about vast bodies of water that never fails to unsettle and astonish him. He likes the idea of praying here, on the rocky sand, water spreading out boundless to the horizon in front of him.

When he wanders down the path, he spots a lone figure cross-legged on the beach, a faded, ill-fitting blue sweater over orange flight coveralls. The person turns at the crunch of Bodhi’s steps, smiles, and waves slightly. It’s Luke Skywalker, the combined sun and planetfall painting his hair yellow-orange like the mangos Bodhi’s grandmother used to grow in their greenhouse.

“Hi,” he says. “Wanna sit?”

“I actually came out here to pray,” Bodhi says, tentative.

“Oh, yeah, okay. I can leave you alone,” Luke says, his blue eyes wide. “I was just —” he gestures at the ocean, like he can’t come up with the words, and that Bodhi understands. “It’s — it’s a lot to take in.”

Luke seems so caught in some kind of wonder-fear — he’s from Tatooine, another desert planet — that Bodhi’s hesitancy, the protective curl inside him that says prayer isn’t something you can share so easily off Jedha, that it’s safer hidden away or left undone, melts away. He settles himself down slowly and nods. “Yeah, I know.”

Luke looks back at the ocean, rubbing at his ankle absently. “It’s so . . . alive,” he says, letting his mouth hang open slightly. “We lived out near the Dune Sea on Tatooine. I always thought that was a stupid name, because our lives’d be totally different if we had a real sea. But I get it now, I think.”

Even though Luke doesn’t really seem like he’s fully present ( _his soul is floating_ , the grandmothers of the Old Quarter used to say), Bodhi says, “This famous court minister from Jedha, he was sent out to accompany royal expeditions and document them, centuries back. He wrote this one letter back to the queen, where he said that all the oceans he’d seen reminded him of the desert back home. Because they both captured the immensity of the Force.”

“Yeah,” Luke agrees, slowly, “yeah, that’s . . . right, I think. It’s almost like I can _feel_ how much is alive out there.” He says it with awe — terror and exhilaration and amazement all folded together.

Bodhi squints, to better observe Luke in profile. Because he decides he likes the idea, he offers, “Maybe you can.”  

Luke’s eyes flicker over and make contact for a moment, before being pulled back toward the waves, but he smiles faintly.

“I’m going to pray now,” Bodhi says, folding his legs under him properly. It’s been so long since he prayed regularly; at the Service Academy, the few odd times he’d managed to pray properly, not just whispered calls for help from the cockpit, he’d done it behind locked doors, away from prying eyes and ears. But surely if there’s anyone it’s safe to entrust this to, it’s the boy who might be a Jedi.

“Okay,” Luke murmurs. “I’ll be quiet. I won’t disturb you.”

Bodhi shuts his eyes, and murmurs the words under his breath — _Just as planets rotate and winds alter, the Force is both constant and changing. In remembering this, we remember the Path. We are one with the Force and the Force is with us. Across time and throughout space, the Path taught by the Wandering Ones reminds us that all living beings are united in the Force. May our constant companions through change be the wisdom of the teachings and the compassion to act on them._

Bodhi’s almost surprised he remembers it all — evening prayers were easy to miss, even for the devout, with food to prepare and families to wrangle. But then maybe it’s because he’d always liked the words of this one best, even if he’s still not sure he really understands. The talk of planets rotating and the expanse of space might have been what carved it into Bodhi’s memory — his eyes were always cast skyward as a child.

He lets his eyes slip open again, the darkening ocean waves filling his vision. Beside him, Luke’s still quiet, leaning forward, fingers pressed lightly against his mouth. He’s frowning slightly, against the low light maybe, or lost in thought.

“Hey,” Bodhi says, not sure he wants Luke to even hear, “thank you.”

“Oh,” Luke says, turning to look at Bodhi, his pale eyebrows rising a little. “I didn’t do anything, though.” His voice ticks up slightly at the end, slipping towards a question.  

“Yeah, no, I know, that’s — that’s _why_ ,” Bodhi struggles, thinking about the long years when he all but shut this away, the way he’d told himself prayer times hardly mattered in space, but passing inspection always did.

“Okay,” Luke says and bites his lip. “Well, thank you, too. For that story about the minister. I’m not — I’m not used to being able to talk about it. I mean, it’s always been there for me, but I don’t really have the right words for it. Yet.”

Bodhi doesn’t really understand — he can’t, maybe, because the mysteries of the Force reveal themselves in strange and different ways to people — but he just nods and stands up, brushing off his pants.

“It’s getting dark,” he observes. “You should get back inside base soon.”

“I will,” Luke promise, head tilted up. Bodhi already knows from a single sabacc game that Luke Skywalker is a terrible liar and regardless, Bodhi supposes a boy old enough to blow the Death Star (“An idea almost twenty years in the making,” Galen had murmured once) to debris is old enough to know when he needs sleep.

“Alright. Good night,” Bodhi says.

“Good night,” Luke echoes.

Instead of heading to the dining hall, Bodhi finds himself tracing his way to Chirrut and Baze’s quarters. When he was very young, at every uncertain juncture in their lives, his mother used to bring them down to the Temple to sit with the Disciples, to listen for guidance in their exegesis of the Wandering Ones’ lessons. There may be no more Disciples left, but Chirrut and Baze are the closest thing to the Temple Bodhi may ever have now and he needs their words.

Seemingly utterly unsurprised by Bodhi’s entrance, Chirrut pats the floor beside him. “You just missed joining sun-down prayers,” he says.

“I actually, I did do them,” Bodhi replies, sitting down cross legged, a faint flush of heat in his cheeks, like he’s seven and being dragged into his home after sunset by Khadijah Aunty. “I just went and did them outside. I saw Luke Skywalker. I think he might really be a Jedi,” Bodhi says to Chirrut. “Have you met him yet?”

Chirrut grins. “No, not yet.”

“Don’t you want to?” Bodhi asks, at a loss. “Don’t you think it could be important?”

“He will come visit us when it is time,” Chirrut says peaceably.  

Baze rolls his eyes and Bodhi is reminded that so much of the Temple’s proceedings were a pleasant, accepted mystery to him as a child.

“We are going to meet him,” Baze says. “The princess wants to introduce us.”

“And we will teach him the lessons of Path, if that is what he wants,” Chirrut says. “Also staff fighting. It’s good to have skills.”  

“Um. Right, yeah,” Bodhi blinks. He doesn’t feel any more informed than he did before really.

“I believe that isn’t what you came here to discuss, though,” Chirrut says, folding his hands together.

Bodhi startles — it _wasn’t_ , but he doesn’t like the idea that he’s so easy to read, so transparent when he’d carried such heavy secrets.

“I told you, so many years pretending to be a fortune teller did you no favors,” Baze says to Chirrut, shaking his head. “Let him speak when he wants to.”

“I asked to be a medic. I’m supposed to start training tomorrow,” Bodhi says, tangling his fingers together. Buried somewhere in his words, he thinks is the truth: he wants a blessing, from home.

“A worthy calling, indeed,” Chirrut says, clapping Baze on the arm. “Isn't that right?”

“It is,” Baze says.

Bodhi swallows and something knotted in his stomach loosens. “I don’t know whether I’ll be any good,” he says, thinking of Himghal studying him and his fear.

“You asked and they said yes,” Baze replies, measured. It makes Bodhi feel hope as an ache in his liver.

* * *

In the morning, Bodhi wakes to his heart hammering too quickly, that odd tension in his jaw from grinding his teeth. He’d dreamt he was standing by edge of Jedha City’s mesa, the jagged sudden drop before him. The ground was shaking, solid earth turned as delicate and breakable as porcelain, and he was coming apart with it.

(“You need to breathe,” the voice of his sister Tara tells him from the lingering haze of his dreams.

“Like Ma always says,” follows Chandni's voice, because they always did all their bossing around of him in tandem.

Some mornings, their absence and his ignorance still feel new and unhealed.)

In the dining hall, Bodhi manages to swallow down some food, mostly because Jyn and Cassian are being surly at each other and having a roll stuffed in his mouth means he can’t be expected to somehow arbitrate.

Jyn squeezes his upper arm when he goes to leave and Cassian breaks off his dark looks long enough to nod at him.

Yalthai’s waiting for him in Chief Himghal’s office. Her green skin seems a shade fuller this morning, not the wilting paleness of yesterday. “So it seems we have our new medic after all,” she greets him.

Bodhi smiles weakly — it's polite and Yalthai's polite — and wipes his hands against his trousers.

“We’ll do the tests in two parts,” Yalthai explains. “We don't have anything you could call a set curriculum, but given the diversity of species we treat, we do all utilize a variety of healing traditions here. I suspect that’ll be a bit different than your previous training, so don’t be worried if you encounter some questions on topics you’re not familiar with.”

Bodhi nods — on Jedha, it was like that, too, the traditions of those who came to live in the presence of the Temple melding together. You were as likely to be given pills and tonics as herb pastes and medallions by old Leela-sahiba, with her discerning eyes. At the Service Academy, it’d been different — there was only the clean surfaces and injections and swiftness of Core biomedicine. Bodhi’d never doubted its effectiveness. (The story went that the Last King’s great-great-grandmother had been the first to vaccinate her children, to demonstrate this offworlder medicine could be integrated just as easily as any other.) But it wasn’t anything like the hodge-podge of approaches that kept Bodhi alive until seventeen in a city prone to burning. There’s an odd comfort in knowing Himghal and Yalthai would’ve taken Leela-sahiba’s probing questions and hard-earned wisdom seriously, if they’d ever had the chance to meet.

The first section of the exam’s fine — not so different from what Bodhi’d covered in the Academy, stuff that he’d kept up with okay. His brain, it seems, still has access to that knowledge. There’s still, miraculously, an automatic shortcut to triage procedures and the symptoms of bloodburn syndrome. But after the break — Yalthai brings him something to eat and smiles when she collects his datapad of answers — it all starts coming apart on him. His knowledge of non-human body systems is nearly all guesswork and half-remembered secondary school lessons. He keeps rearranging himself in his chair, uncomfortable in his suddenly evident ignorance. Two hours in and Bodhi's gone from sweat prickling at the back of his neck to a sort of blind resignation. He can guess at some of what he's left unanswered but there are questions with premises he can't even grasp.

Then suddenly, his time’s up.

“How do you feel?” Yalthai asks, voice clear and steady, like when he just woke up.

“Awful,” Bodhi almost laughs, only holding back curses because Yalthai’s so _neat_ all the time and it’d be like swearing in front of a teacher, wouldn’t it. He automatically reaches up to pull at the hair he doesn’t even have any more. He rubs his palms over the stubble starting to grow in anyway, tumbling out with, “That was terrible. I don’t know anything.”

Yalthai leans against Himghal’s desk. It strikes Bodhi as strangely casual gesture for someone so deliberately put together. She says firmly, “Arrogance kills just as much as ignorance. Knowing you don’t have all the answers is a powerful thing.”

“Yeah, but what if all I am is ignorant?” Bodhi asks, feeling his breath starting to go irregular.

“Then that’s what _we’re_ here for,” Yalthai says, putting a hand on Bodhi’s shoulder and squeezing gently. “None of us came into this knowing all the answers. We can never have all of them, but what we know, we’re going to teach you.”

Bodhi struggles, his mouth open, but then he wonders, what use is hesitation? Yalthai has seen him swimming between consciousness and the place beyond, given him new limbs — she may very well know his body better than he himself does now, so what is one more secret?

“I just don’t want to get someone killed because I need to . . . to make up for something,” Bodhi confesses.

Dr. Yalthai studies him with her dark, searching eyes. “When I reached the Rebellion, I had not spoken in three weeks,” she finally says. “I thought perhaps I could not speak any longer. And yet Chief Himghal recognized something in me I thought was gone, put a scalpel back in my hands. I’ve been your doctor — I’ve monitored your progress. You have steady hands, basic field training, and a conscience. That’s a good beginning. We can make a proper medic out of you.”  

Bodhi swallows, nods quickly. “Thank you,” he manages to mutter. Secrets in exchange for secrets. He doesn’t know whether he’s really proven himself or his scrambled brain deserving of that yet, but what else can he do but hold her confession, now that it’s been given?

Yalthai touches his shoulder again, brief and soft, and then says, “Let me see if Una — you already know Una, don’t you? — if she and Ilan are off-shift. They make up second emergency medical response team. Ilan’s the attending-in-charge and Una’s primary medic. Una’s very excited to have you joining the team,” Yalthai smiles slightly. “If you’re feeling up to it, I think you should take the opportunity to get acquainted.”

Bodhi chews on his lip for a moment — he wants nothing more to crawl into bed and hide from the churning shame of it all. But regardless, he is still here. After moments so shattering he wakes up amazed he still has one unitary body at all, that anyone can recognize him as the same person Galen Erso handed a datachip to. Shame may be painted hot across his cheeks at the moment, but that's because he's still got a functioning circulatory system in the first place. And that’s what Nela Sandskimmer and Una Laughlin and whoever Ilan will be gave him.

“I . . . I’d like that,” Bodhi manages.

Yalthai nods and stands up, heading out of the office, down the hallway. Bodhi trails behind her. Yalthai flags down one of the med droids and asks, “Two One-Bee, do you know if Ilan and Una are still around?”

“I believe they are outside, attempting to transplant our store of medicinal herbs,” the droid replies.

“Yes, of course,” Yalthai murmurs. “Thank you.” Gesturing for Bodhi to follow, Yalthai heads out down another dirt path, stopping before a clearing of overturned soil and freshly-planted seedlings. Una and the Twi’lek physician he’d see with Yalthai yesterday are sitting by the new rows of soil, out of breath.

“Ah, there we are,” Yalthai says. “I should have realized you’d be out here.”

Una swipes sweat away from her forehead with her arm and waves cheerily at Bodhi. The Twi’lek next to her looks up, taking in Bodhi with curious, assessing eyes.

“Ilan, this is Bodhi. He’s going to be your second EMR team medic.” Yalthai sticks her hands in the pockets of her robes and smiles.

“That’s good news,” the Twi’lek says, giving Bodhi a short nod of approval. “Now we just need that _shuttle_. Last time we lost one, we didn’t get another for half a standard year! Oh,” she adds as an afterthought, “sorry. I’m Dr. Ilan Medinara.”

Being grounded for half a standard year is an almost surreal thought. Bodhi hasn’t spent that much consecutive time planet-bound since he was little more than a child.

But then Una cuts in before the thought can fully bloom into regret. “So, you’re going to be one of us,” she says, grinning. “Didn’t I say you’d be useful?”

Ilan glances over to her, with a hint of a smile, and then gets up and extends her hand to Bodhi, which Bodhi shakes. She has a sure, steady grip. “It’s good to meet you,” she says. “Now, I think we deserve a break and some tea.”

Yalthai nods at Bodhi once, when he looks back as they head down to the mess hall. Looking at her solemn silhouette, Bodhi’s mind flashes to the statues carved into the sandstone outside the Holy City.

“I heard we finally got those agricultural shipments that’ve been held up,” Una’s saying when Bodhi shifts his attention back to her and Ilan. “Maybe we’ll finally make a full shift off bar rations!”

“And not a moment too soon,” Ilan says dryly. “We ought to use those as psychological weapons.”

Over the course of the next hour, sitting in the mess hall with slowly cooling cups of tea in front of them, Bodhi discovers that Ilan got her start as a junior medic for the Free Ryloth movement — “I realized if we wanted to liberate Ryloth and keep it free, we had to start thinking about the greater galaxy,” she says, eyes distant — and earned her doctor’s gown (professionally, if not literally) serving with the Alliance. She’s got two kids and a wife hidden away on some small Mid-Rim planet and she shows Bodhi and Una holos of them. “The children are older than that now, of course. They must be taller already,” she says.

Another small tragedy of the war, Bodhi thinks.  

“They’re beautiful,” Bodhi says, automatically. After joining up, seeing children was sort of a novelty, even though he’d grown up surrounded by cousins. Working cargo duty, he’d gotten used to interacting with only other adults, mostly human, on days when he saw anyone other than his shuttle partner. The base here isn’t so different — there’s dozens and dozens of species, but no children, outside of the holos tucked into flight suit pockets, held close in lockets, pinned up in lockers. And there’s no easy shuttle jump home for most people here, not when the Empire’d like to execute them all.

Una, cheerful Una who raises flowering plants and smokes illicit cigarettes, had joined the Galactic Emergency Services Corps straight out of university. “I really thought that’d be my whole career,” she says. “Then they cut the funding for our Outer Rim operations — they stopped even pretending to care.” So she’d stolen herself and a fortune’s worth of medical supplies away after the Senate’s condemnation of the defunding had lead to very little actual action.

“Of course, that meant I ended up wandering around the Outer Rim with cargo containers of dysentery meds, desperately trying to find a real Rebel who’d tell me where to go,” Una laughs. “By the time Andor approached me, I’d had to pawn most of my personal belongings.”

“Cassian recruited you?” Bodhi says, startled.

“Well, he didn’t really have to do any recruiting,” Una replies. “He just swooped in and got me off Phulghat One before anyone could steal my already-stolen shuttle and collect the insultingly low bounty on my head.”

“But the important part is he found you before you had to sell the medallion,” Ilan says, cupping her mug in both hands. She’s smiling like she’s heard this story before.

“That’s true,” Una say, reaching into her scrubs to pull out a small piece of round, golden jewelry. She tips it towards the light for Bodhi to look at. It’s got a hooded snake spiraling around some kind of scepter. “It’s the sign for Asclepius, my guardian saint. Patron of healers and those sleeping and the truth,” she says, a bit sing-song.

“Truth, uh, has a guardian saint?” Bodhi asks, smiling a little.

“Someone needs to look after it,” Ilan says dryly.

Bodhi thinks of home, of the rumors that buzzed from rooftop to rooftop, the Imperial recruitment posters and the graffiti that’d appear overnight slashed across them, and agrees.  

“I was given my name at his shrine, back home,” Una says, tucking the medallion back into her top. “He’s been my protector ever since.”

“So, first rotation tomorrow, isn’t it?” Ilan asks Bodhi now, assessing. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m, yeah . . . I’m nervous,” Bodhi admits, jiggling his leg. “There’s so much I don’t know.”

“Gods, Bodhi,” Una laughs, “you think half the starfighter pilots we’ve got knew, pardon my language, but fuck-all, about combat strategy before they got here? Loads of them are so young they don’t even really remember the Republic.”

Neither does Bodhi, and Una’s not all the much older than him, he realizes now.

Ilan blows air out of her nose, looking terribly tired suddenly. “Look, if the Chief thinks you’re not cutting it, xe will _say_ ,” Ilan tells him.

Despite himself, Bodhi smiles. “Yeah, I got that impression.”

“Put your shoulder into it. And study,” Ilan says, as she gets up from the table. “That’s all you can really do.”

“This is going to work out,” Una says, leaning in. “I can tell.”

When he reports to the med bay the next day, a good fifteen minutes before first rotation, Yalthai hands him a stack of datachips and a schedule. “Ilan’s going to be in, and she’ll begin with your amphibious species’ biology lessons. After mid-day, you’ll be shadowing Una through the wards and then I’ll be briefing you on our emergency response protocols,” she announces. Then she hands him a green armband — the old Republic sign for medical personnel and ships, signaling that they were not to be fired on or carry weapons. “Welcome to Alliance Medical.”

The next several hours demand more from Bodhi than his body quite knows what to do with. Ilan is probing and thorough, but doesn’t seem nearly as alarmed as Bodhi about how little he knows. Una introduces him to the patients as she goes through her rounds, explaining what she’s doing for both Bodhi and her patients. Yalthai goes over procedures efficiently, reorienting how Bodhi sees the med bay and sends him off with reading and work to be completed on his own.

When Bodhi gets to the mess hall at the end of rotation, he barely has the energy to nod at whatever he’s being handed. He spots Jyn and Cassian over at one of the tables, leaning in towards one another.  Cassian’s red-eyed, like maybe he’s been crying (or exposed to irritants, Bodhi’s muddled brain supplies).

“What happened?” Bodhi says, trying to swallow against his rising fear.

“Kaytoo’s finally back,” Jyn says, smiling.

“But, Cassian, that’s great,” Bodhi says, relief rushing through his limbs.

For a moment, it seems like Cassian’s about to say something, but then he just nods and laughs, rubbing at his collarbone.

“He doesn’t remember what happened on Scarif. Or well, meeting us,” Jyn says, “since his last back-up was just before they broke me out, but he’s back.”

“He’ll like you all very much when he meets you again,” Cassian says, voice rough.

Bodhi has serious doubts about Kaytoo really liking anyone but Cassian. Jyn’s facial expression makes it abundantly clear that she feels the same. Cassian laughs.

“Or he’ll come around again anyway,” he says.

“When can we see him?” Bodhi asks.

Cassian clears his throat. “In a few days, maybe. He still needs to be charging for most of the day right now.”

Bodhi smiles, feeling something in him settle, just a little bit. It’s not enough, nothing could ever be enough, to make it better. But this is one more person still here, one more person who made it through.

* * *

The next evening, when he comes off rotation, wondering if it’s possible to get an information overload headache (a psychosomatic sensation maybe?) Bodhi heads over to Chirrut and Baze’s quarters to do sun-down prayers. He’s about to leave when suddenly Chirrut sits up quite straight and smiles mysteriously at something behind Bodhi.

“Ah, welcome, welcome,” Chirrut says, getting up and waving towards the door. Bodhi turns his head and looks up — Luke and Princess Leia are standing in the open doorway. Bodhi scrambles to his feet a few seconds behind Baze.

Leia stands with her hands folded together, with all the elegance of marble. “Please,” she says, “surely, there’s no need to stand on ceremony among friends.”

Baze bows his head in acknowledgment and Chirrut grins.

“Are you —?” Luke begins, leaning in.

“Don’t get too excited. That wasn’t special powers. He heard you coming,” Baze says to Luke. “You don’t walk that quietly. You might want to work on that.”

“My mother liked to say that announcing one’s presence in advance was a matter of courtesy,” Leia says, with a distant sort of smile.

“I’m sure that’s true in diplomacy, your highness, but I’m afraid since the Temple was closed, my companion and I have been better acquainted with petty criminals than royalty,” Chirrut says.

“I’ve gotten to know some petty criminals recently,” Leia says. “They have their uses.”

Chirrut laughs and behind the princess, Luke flashes a smile and ducks his head down.

“In any case,” Leia says, amusement dancing across her face, “I thought you might want to meet Luke. He’s certainly wanted to meet you two. Luke, these are honored Chirrut Imwe and honored Baze Malbus, Guardians of the Whills.”

Luke smiles faintly, standing with his hands folded behind his back, not quite at military attention but close to it. He looks like he’s barely keeping himself from fidgeting under Baze’s investigatory gaze.

“Skywalker.” Baze repeats. “So, your father was the Jedi general.”

“Yeah,” Luke agrees. “Apparently. I, uh, I didn’t know.”

Chirrut tilts his head slightly sidewise at that; Bodhi wonders what that means.

“As we understand it,” Leia says, “his father served with General Kenobi in the Clone Wars, before he was killed by Vader.”

“Yes. Anakin Skywalker was on the holonews, often, during the Clone Wars,” Baze says in a very even tone of voice. Once, Bodhi remembers, it had been considered unbecoming for a Guardian to ever end up in the news. It indicated a crisis had come to head rather than been smoothed away or averted.

“So you knew about him?” Luke asks, leaning in now. He’s very wide-eyed, like even some second-hand report of a decades-old holonews story has the worth of drinking water. It makes Bodhi uncomfortable. He shifts on his feet.

“We knew about the Clone Wars. I am afraid we only knew your father as well as anyone with a steady holonet connection would have in those days,” Chirrut says. “But we do know something about the Force.”

“Well, I could definitely use some help with that,” Luke laughs.

“Certainly. It would be our privilege to offer you what guidance we can,” Chirrut says, with a pleased smile. “Come, please sit.” Chirrut gestures to the cushions on the floor.

Both Luke and the princess fold themselves down, legs crossed. In the moment before he joins them on the floor Bodhi looks down on them, struck by how little space they both take up. Bodhi’s always had the impression that off Jedha, royalty tended not to sit on the floor, but the princess is as straight-backed and self-possessed as ever.

Luke glances over at Leia, who smiles at him with unexpectedly evident warmth and nods. “Ben Ke — Obi-Wan,” he stumbles, “wanted to train me, as a Jedi.”

Luke’s eyebrows draw together as he pauses, head dropped down, searching for words. Bodhi has the dizzy sense that this all could be history one day, flavored with the same tinge of unreality that’d followed the Jedi of his hazy childhood memories. He’s not sure he’s supposed to be here for this.

“I’d still like that,” Luke continues, looking up again at Chirrut and then Baze in turn. The princess has a hand resting lightly on Luke’s upper arm. “To carry through on what he planned. Become a Jedi. I just don’t know where to start on my own. I’d like your help, since you’re willing.”

Chirrut tips his head towards Baze, sitting on his left, and Bodhi looks too.

“A new Jedi. That’s something no one’s heard of in a long time,” Baze says, words slow and heavy. He’s staring at Luke, wearing the kind of look that warned any Temple pilgrims who might be tempted against potential misdeeds without a word.

Even though he’s not the one on the receiving end, Bodhi drops his gaze and feels an instinctive curl of trepidation and flustered shame in his gut. Whenever any of the Guardians had that expression on, Bodhi couldn’t shake the uncanny sense that they knew about all the times Bodhi’d ever cheated at cards, just by spotting his face in the crowd. When Bodhi manages a glance back up though, Leia’s expression is unchanged — serious, concentrated.

“I know,” Luke says, finally breaking the silence. “Vader made sure there wasn’t a chance of that. Leia told me about it, how any Jedi who were left were hunted down. And she told me about the Inquisitors.”

Bodhi remembers two armor-clad Inquisitors sweeping through Jedha City when he was eight or so — Jedha still had a lingering reputation for producing a higher than average number of Force Sensitive children. Bodhi and his classmates had been shocked silent in their fear and clawing desire to be found utterly ordinary. They’d come back again a few years later. The sound of his younger cousins crying in anticipatory terror had woken Bodhi in the middle of the night.

“Vader’s not going find Luke,” Leia declares, fierce. “But we think it would help, if you can show him how to . . . control what he can do.”

“That is not a simple task,” Baze replies, measured, and it makes Bodhi’s skin itch and he can’t help himself.

“But you’re going to _help_ , right?” he bursts out before he can stop himself. “In school, that’s the first thing they’d teach us, that Ananda said —”

Baze and Chirrut are both smiling now and Baze claps a hand on Bodhi’s shoulder, smiling. “We know what Ananda said, little brother.”

Bodhi immediately goes hot, flushed, like he’s in school again and called out the wrong answer. Of course they _know_ , they’d know so much better than him.

“And it is one of many things that we would be more than happy to teach you,” Chirrut adds with a nod to Luke. “But Baze spoke the truth. We aren’t Jedi.”

Luke’s face falls visibly at that.

Chirrut, though, continues, “But the lessons of the Path offer insight to all those willing to listen and engage. The Force contains multitudes. Our knowledge and methods may not be what Master Kenobi planned to give you, but there is much in the Wandering Ones’ teachings I believe can guide you. And much from our own training as Guardians of the Whills that can develop your strength.”

Bodhi closes his eyes, thinks for a minute that he could almost be a round-cheeked child sitting in one of the Temple’s outer courtyards, half listening to a sermon while actually playing illicit games of stone-scissors-cloth with his cousin Shabana.

“He wants to teach you to staff fight,” Baze says flatly, and the illusion abruptly breaks. Bodhi opens his eyes again but keeps them trained on his knees, trying not to laugh. “He thinks it’s efficient. It isn’t, compared to a blaster.”

“I think the many Storm Troopers I have fought would disagree,” Chirrut replies cheerfully. He leans towards Luke and adds almost conspiratorially, “Learning to staff fight is very good for developing your spatial awareness.”

At that, Bodhi can’t help himself anymore, and bursts out laughing. “Sorry, sorry,” he gasps, trying to rein himself back in — it’s undignified, it’s got to be, especially in front of royalty. Meeting Baze’s amused eyes almost sets him off again.

Luke glances over to him and the smile that’s flickering into imminent existence breaks unevenly over his face. “Uh, okay,” Luke says, wearing a lopsided grin. “I’d be up for that. But I am trained with blasters,” he rushes to assure Baze. “I, uh, don’t really see myself replacing that with a staff any time soon.”

Baze turns to face Chirrut and says, “Fine. Now I know at least one of you will have some sense.”

Leia laughs, flashing her teeth. Luke’s bright gaze darts across them all, catching on Bodhi for a moment. Bodhi smiles back.   

“Yes, yes,” Chirrut says, waving a hand. “I think our young student of Ananda should learn the art of staff fighting with you!”  

“Uh,” Bodhi blinks. It’s not that he’s never picked up a staff as a _potential_ weapon — Khadijah Aunty had kept a _lathi_ behind the counter of her sweet shop and made sure each of her nieces and nephews knew how to get in at least one decent hit. In case of thieves she’d said, though the streets of Bodhi’s childhood were violent enough that she could have said other things. But he’s not sure hitting people is really a desire he should be indulging right now.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Luke says, quietly.

“Yes!” Chirrut says cheerfully. “This will work better in pairs! And it teaches concentration. Balance,” he adds, a certain weight to the word, a heavy puzzle like the riddle of a teaching story.

Bodhi glances at Baze, who gives a tiny nod. Bodhi bites his lip for just a second, thinks of Khadijah Aunty standing in the family courtyard with her hands on her hips and her dark eyebrows drawn together as she shouted instructions him; he thinks of his own thin hands around the _lathi_ , the surprising solidity of it, how it made him feel, for a moment, like more than just a scrawny twelve year old with hair still short enough to be a daily reminder of his father’s death.

Bodhi takes a deep breath in. “Sure,” he says. “Why not? I’ll do it.”

* * *

It’s another three full days later when they all get to see Kaytoo. Partly that’s because whatever it is Cassian and Jyn spend their time doing for the Alliance day-to-day, they both keep irregular and shifting rotations, utterly unlike the regimented time the med bay is beginning to instill into Bodhi’s circadian rhythms. And partly it’s because Kaytoo’s rebirth has been a patchwork thing, the engineers stealing spare moments between ship repairs and constructing consoles and communications equipment.

Bodhi’s oddly nervous. He’d . . . perhaps liked isn’t quite the word, maybe there hadn't been enough time to say liked, but he’d _recognized_ Kaytoo.

“Cassian tells me we’ve met before,” Kaytoo says, looking down at them all. He isn’t in that recognizable gray frame anymore — he still towers over them all but his legs are different colors and his new torso’s thinner, disparate salvaged materials evidently soldered together. “I don’t have those memory files.”

Chirrut nods. “We do know each other,” he says with that kind of equanimeous smile that makes Bodhi think of home.

“It is good you have returned, my friend,” Baze adds. “The captain has been worried.”

“My memory files are almost entirely intact and this operating system functions perfectly well,” Kaytoo huffs. “Cassian did not need to be concerned. Although I am . . . unused to this new frame. It is rather makeshift.”

“Yeah, bet it does take a bit of getting used to,” Bodhi says. “I, uh, I got some new legs after Scarif. They’ve been great, but there are still these little things that surprise me about them.”

It’s strange thinking that Kaytoo doesn’t have access to the affinity Bodhi feels for him anymore, the way he’d recognized something in Kay, not just the familiarity of a droid type that he’d seen walking around Imperial bases, but someone pulled out of place and reoriented.

“Are they durasteel based?” Kaytoo inquires, tipping his head sideways — this at least is the same as the old Kaytoo — the same color, the same design, and the same mannerism.

“Kay,” Cassian cuts in, a smile in his eyes. He’s _happy_ , for maybe the first time Bodhi’s ever seen. “It’s not an interrogation.”

“No, um, it’s alright,” Bodhi quickly responds. Now that he has some med bay rotations behind him, he’s found himself wanting to talk about it more. Yalthai, he realizes better now, made art when she made his legs. “Yeah, they’re durasteel, beneath the synth skin.”

“Very reliable,” Kaytoo says approvingly.

Jyn grins lopsidedly and pats him on the elbow, which is roughly where her shoulder comes up to. Kay looks down at her with a remarkably suspicious gaze for someone who still only has one facial expression.

“I am not in need of your human expressions of physical affection,” he informs her.

“Ah, but perhaps we are,” Chirrut says.

* * *

A month and a half later, his brain is swimming in information about muscle tears and bone replacements and bacteria, but he still doesn’t have flight clearance. Instead, he has weekly appointments with Dr. Kalonia, which seem to spiral in circles.

When he’d complained about it, sitting and studying diagrams of the Mon Calamari respiratory system at the medic’s station, Una’d just said, “Well, what would you fly even if you could? We still haven’t got a bloody shuttle. Maybe we should just steal some propulsion packs.”

“Hells no,” Bodhi had laughed. “Propulsion packs are terrible. So are spacesuits.”

For now, his appointments continue. Kalonia’s speciality is actually biomedical emergency medicine, but her secondary training’s in psych. They’re roughly the same age, both humans from occupied planets, and they wear the same green med bay bands on their arms, but that’s where the similarities end.

Kalonia’s so measured, all the time. It’s utterly foreign to Bodhi — she’s not serene ( _be like a lotus floating in a pool_ ), she’s not fighting her way through a whirlpool of grasping anger, she’s not particularly cheerful, either — she’s just deliberate, like she knows exactly where she wants her next footstep to land. Bodhi wants her to give him the answers, tell him how to become that, but of course she won’t. That’s not how it works.

Instead, she seems to respond to him mostly in questions.

“I know I’m supposed to just let pass through me. Let go of it,” Bodhi tells her, twisting his fingers together for the discomfort of it. “How angry I am. But at the time, it’s just . . . I can’t even get myself to think like that.”

“Why do you say you’re ‘supposed to’?” Kalonia asks, sitting with her legs crossed at the ankle, her neat brown hair falling uniformly just at the hinge of her jaw.

“Well, because how can I do anything, otherwise?” Bodhi asks. “When I’m angry like that?”

“Can you explain what you mean by that for me?” Kalonia asks, neutral.

“When I think about it, how much I hate them for Jedha, it feels — it makes me feel like I don’t even know myself anymore,” Bodhi says, untangling his fingers, staring at them in his lap. “Like there’s this whole . . . well of _rage_ , like there’s this whole sun trying to eat me from the inside out.” He grits his teeth. It’s what he meant to say; it’s how he feels. But aloud it sounds almost pretty, like the suffering you’d find in a holoserial, like some historical painting of a revolution, and it’s not. It’s burning through his veins and he needs to make that clear. “It makes me feel like I’m not in control of my own body. Like they took that from me, too. And I don’t _want_ that.”

Kalonia nods, slow and thoughtful. “But that feeling, it’s temporary, you’ve said. Let’s try to focus on that. What brings you back? What makes you feel like it’s your body again?” she asks.

Bodhi shrugs helplessly. “Sometimes I go down to the beach, without shoes on? It’s the physical sensation — the rocks. Or going over how to prep veins for injections or blood samples. I don’t why. Because I have to concentrate, maybe.”

“How is the training you mentioned going? With the Guardians. Because physical exercise can help,” Kalonia says, hands clasped in front of her.

Bodhi nods, itchy with a frustration he wishes wasn’t there. He can’t argue with Kalonia or ignore her, because he knows she’s right — it’s the kind of advice Ilan or Yalthai’d tell him to pass on to a patient.

“Fine, I guess. Honestly, I don’t go all the time. And Luke’s better at it than me,” he gives Kalonia a little smile to make it clear it’s not something he minds. “But we do running drills, me and Una and Ilan. You know, field prep.”

“That’s good,” Kalonia replies.

What he and Kalonia don’t discuss before the session’s up, though, is that Baze and Chirrut’s training is all about control — muscles and movement and mind snapped into tandem, and Bodhi struggles with it, getting it all to align for more than a passing moment.

Still, he joins them early, early the next morning, before dawn prayers. Early enough for mist to still be lingering at ankle height on the outdoor training grounds. He lets Chirrut fix his grip and tries to copy Baze’s footwork.

“Again,” Chirrut says, tracking their movements with his echo box.

At night, when he returns to the quarters Jyn and he share now that his old roommate’s got partnered housing, he falls asleep the moment his head hits the pillow.

* * *

It’s a week or so later, on Jaheziday (they’ve semi-adopted Chaladh’s local calendar to make logistics easier and to coordinate monthly Halfway Markets with the sparse but helpful local settlements) and it’s been a quiet morning in the med bay, most of the beds empty. That’s probably for the best, since they’re operating without a full rotation staff. Two One-Bee and Chief Himghal are both off on dispatch duty for different military-side training exercises — Bodhi and Una have concluded that the Chief definitely sent xerself with General Draven’s group purely to spite him.

Bodhi’s sitting at the medic’s station with Una, reading up on his pharmacology lessons, keeping half an ear out for any requests for assistance. Ilan and Yalthai are in the main lab, running the experiments they fit in between the irregular waves and lulls of patient care. Ilan’s looking over the results for some new treatment plan; Yalthai’s working on the next generation of her synth skin for grafts.

Then all their comms go off as a chiming chorus.

“Fire in landing bay two,” an ops officer’s voice comes over their lines, echoing himself. “It’s been put out but possible minor injuries. Med response requested.”

“You two take this,” Yalthai says, emerging from the lab to swiftly nod at Bodhi and Una.

Bodhi levers himself up from his awkward lounging position quickly — his back is a bit stiff — and immediately grabs his mobile response kit.

“Alright, some excitement finally,” Una says, grabbing her own response kit.

“Try not to sound quite so thrilled that someone might be hurt,” Ilan says wryly from the doorway, lab glasses still on, but Yalthai gives them both a little secret smile over her shoulder on their way out.

When they get to landing bay two, it’s immediately obvious what had caught fire. It’s the horribly beat-up Correllian freighter that belongs to Han Solo and Chewbacca, the princess and Luke’s smuggler friends.

“Well,” Una says, at the sight of the lightly smoking ship. “Suppose that shouldn’t have been a surprise.”

“Yeah,” Bodhi agrees, and re-shoulders his response kit to follow her in.

Jyn’s there in the landing bay too, holding a fire douser and looking liable to punch someone.

“No, but I do know you,” Solo’s saying, shaking his pointed finger at her. “You were calling yourself . . . Tanith something!” he say, victorious, before his face contorts into some kind of confusion. “I never realized _you_ were —”

“Hi there, Captain, Chewie,” Una cuts in. “We heard there was a fire and you know we love to break out those burn treatments. Why don’t we all sit down?”

Solo blinks, perplexed, but sits down on a cargo container and Chewie (how a Wookiee that big got such a nickname Bodhi really doesn’t know) pats Una on the shoulder, gentler than you’d expect. Bodhi is impressed as always by Una’s capacity to make people do exactly what she wants by overwhelming them with her cheerful chatter.

“You take care of Solo’s hand,” Una instructs Bodhi in an undertone.

Bodhi nods quickly, a little relieved. He’s not sure he’s ready to handle assessing a Wookiee potentially in pain yet. Solo’s left wrist is going red, but it doesn’t look serious.

And evidently Solo doesn’t think it’s serious either because he’s back to talking, again.

“You. You stole my shipment!” Solo says to Jyn, gesticulating with his unburned hand but still managing to get in the way of Bodhi’s attempt to pull back his burnt shirt sleeve. “That was worth a hell of a lot of credits.”

“Captain,” Bodhi cuts in, holding the burn ointment and willing himself to not already be exasperated. “Would you _please_ stop moving.” He’s glad Ilan isn’t here — she’s always talking to Bodhi about the skill in good bedside manner and usually he tries, he really does.

Jyn raises her eyebrows slightly. “That was over four years ago, Solo. And if you hadn’t heard, we’re on the same side now,” she says.

“Yeah,” Solo shrugs. Bodhi finally gets his sleeve pushed up and slathers some of the gelatinous ointment on. “All right. But how’d you go from stealing my Heskian pearls to being a Rebel fighter?”

“The whole point is that they weren’t _your_ pearls,” Jyn retorts. “And anyway, how’d _you_ go from being a middle-rate smuggler to being a Rebel fighter?” She manages to sound prematurely bored by even the potential of an answer.

Una glances over at Bodhi from where she’s patching up Chewbacca, raising her eyebrows slightly. Of course she and her patient are getting along great. Bodhi shrugs back because he’s really got no idea — whole huge swathes of Jyn’s life are unknown to him, which in honesty, he kind of prefers. He is surprised he’s never heard anything about the Heskian pearls before, though. They’re coveted enough to be traded for transplant-compatible vital humanoid organs on some worlds.

“Well, since you asked so politely,” Solo says with excessive mock-courtesy, “it just so happened that Chewie and I were on Tatooine trying to do some re-negotiation when that old man Kenobi came asking about a ride to Alderaan. Except we found the Death Star, instead. That kind of thing makes an impression on a man.”

“So Calrissian did cut you out,” Jyn says speculatively. “I wouldn’t have guessed he’d dump you, too,” she adds to Chewbacca. “Did you try to cheat him or something?”

“Hey, hey, that’s not how it happened,” Solo says. Bodhi focuses on his bandaging, letting his attention center on the motions of it. “Is that how he’s telling it?”

“You’re good!” Bodhi says, finishing wrapping up Solo’s hand with some relief. “All done.”

Chewbacca roars something, but Bodhi’s Shyriwook is nonexistent. He’s guessing it was a question.  

“I’ll be fine!” Solo responds immediately. “He just _said_ I was good.”

“He has to apply more ointment every six hours, until everything’s healed up, but he will be fine and be able to use the hand again very soon,” Una assures Chewbacca.

“See, easy,” Solo says.

Given the tone, Bodhi has a bad feeling that they’re going to be seeing a lot of Captain Solo and his complete inability to sit through medical examinations in the future. He re-packs his mobile response kit with a certain sense of resignation. Then his mind stumbles on the thought of Himghal treating Solo and he nearly laughs out loud.

“Well,” Una smiles and says, because she’s more pleasantly composed than Bodhi can manage on the best of days. “This has been fun, hasn’t it? If you need anything,” she adds sincerely, “stop by the med bay any time.”

“And, uh, good luck . . . fixing that,” Bodhi says, waving a hand towards the Correllian freighter. It’s not smoking anymore, which is a start.

“Ah, she’ll be fine,” Solo says, with real affection.

Jyn looks as dubious about that prediction as Bodhi feels.

“She’s made it through worse. Even you can back me up on that one,” Solo says to Jyn.

“You do seem to have some kind of absurd luck on your side,” Jyn says, shaking her head. “But next time you’re ‘doing repairs,’ I might not be so nearby with a fire douser at hand.”

“Yeah, well, let’s count this as evening out the score,” Solo says. “I’ve got no hard feelings for anyone who’ll help out the Falcon in a fix.”

As they walk back to the med bay, Bodhi mutters, a little bit ashamed, “I was sort of hoping we’d get something more interesting than minor electrical burns.”

Una laughs. “So did I,” she agrees.

* * *

They’ve been on Chaladh for a little over three standard months and Bodhi’s settled into a routine: getting up for dawn prayers with Chirrut and occasionally Luke, eating breakfast to the background of Jyn and Cassian’s warm-eyed sniping when they’re on base, moving purposefully from examination room to lab to operating theater during rotation. Running emergency response drills with Una and Ilan, trying to shave precious seconds off their time, and roping anyone who will humor him into testing his anatomy and physiology knowledge before Yalthai sits him down for another exam. Kaytoo, it turns out, has a disturbingly thorough knowledge of this stuff, for reasons Bodhi doesn’t want to investigate too deeply.

On the rare days Bodhi’s off rotation or has enough energy to actually do things before or after work, he plays sabacc with a rotating cast of Rebels (they wager non-essential food rations, usually), or lets Ilan drag him to run, or sits in the corner and reads novels borrowed from Chief Himghal’s impressively extensive library while Chirrut and Baze discuss some seminal sermon on the nature of the Force with Luke, who sits cross-legged, frowning in concentration.

This morning, it’s just him and Luke, sitting around in the junior Fleet officers work space. Bodhi technically shouldn’t have access but the Rebellion doesn’t seem to care about that kind of thing the way the Empire did.

Sitting at the small conference table a seat down from Bodhi, Luke frowns, trying to wrap his tongue around another desert language. His pronunciation is amusingly bad, his accent suddenly ten times more obvious than in Basic. Still, he falls into the cadences easily enough, like maybe the pulse of his blood recognizes the motions, the rhythms — but maybe Bodhi’s imagining it because his mother would have liked that. The closest thing to a Jedi left in the galaxy, kneeling and murmuring as her grandmother taught her mother, taught her. A pilot-boy with a smile that surfaces often and unthinkingly, holding that lost connection to the Force.

Bodhi leans over to see what’s tripping Luke up. “That’s a zaal in the middle,” Bodhi prompts, trying not to laugh.

Luke sighs and purses his lips. “I was getting there.”

“You looked like you needed help,” Bodhi says.

Luke glances at him sideways, unimpressed. “I was gonna get it.”

“Okay,” Bodhi agrees, holding up his free hand in a placating manner, though he can’t help grinning.

“Some of us haven’t been reading this since they were a kid, you know,” Luke says, nudging Bodhi with his knee. He’s like that a lot, annoyance slipping between his eyebrows and then melting away, easy and sweet like sugar in chai.

“Yeah, well, honestly, I don’t even know why they’re having you do this,” Bodhi says, glancing again over the hand-written sentences Luke’s attempting to parse.

“Chirrut claims learning Zubaana will help me read the Dialogues and stuff eventually, because those are the best translations or something. But until then, I’ll ‘learn something about patience,’” Luke says, resting his chin on his hand. “Which is _kind of_ rich coming from him.”

Bodhi grins. “Yeah, well, I can see the lesson’s really sinking in.”

“That’s an ain joined to a laam,” Luke says, pointing at his paper. Bodhi glances over — he’s right. “So, yeah,” Luke smiles, “I guess it is.”

“Okay,” Bodhi says, “I get it. You don’t need me. I’ll just leave, I guess.”

“Yeah. Go save some lives or something,” Luke agrees.

* * *

The weather’s shifting towards Chaladh’s sea-spray summer and Bodhi’s hair is long enough to fall across his forehead now. It’s not humid like Yavin was, but located as they are in Chaladh Two’s southern hemisphere, the days have gotten longer and light-filled. Typhoon season, the locals tell them, will be right around the corner, liable to sneak up on you any day now. Bodhi’s never seen a typhoon in person and though on a practical level, he’d much rather avoid it, he likes the taste of the word in his mouth, still has that desert child fascination with how many different ways water is inexorably, unavoidably powerful.

More pressing than the on-coming typhoon season though, is the raids on Imperial outposts that’ve been going on for the past several weeks.

Bodhi gets his first field assignment, accompanying Ilan and a squadron of ground forces.

“They’re trained in demolitions, primarily,” Ilan summarizes.

“Demolitions,” Bodhi repeats. For all the violence implied, it’s still a strangely euphemistic phrase, he thinks, good for describing any number of activities.

They land on a planet he’s been to before, once — only interesting to the Empire because it’s a way-station on a historic trade route. The mission is meant to take out the powerful planetary office of the Imperial Mercantile Association, where a massive load of Imperial-Center-bound weaponry is waiting to be picked up. They’re hoping, Ilan explains, to draw out and take down the Imperial ground forces battalion stationed here as protection. Ilan and Bodhi load their med kits into the troop carrier — they still haven’t got a shuttle of their own but Commander de Aron requested accompanying medical personnel.

Bodhi sits in the troop carrier, tense, through the sound of explosions and then a voice comes up, “Medic!” and then he’s half a step behind Ilan, their boots splashing through clinging mud.

“Over here,” the hoarse voice calls again and Bodhi matches it to a pair of human soldiers. He and Ilan are hunched against the hissing, careening blaster fire.

The dark-haired soldier spread out on the ground — Corporal Tierra, that’s her name, she’d told him on the trip over — is keening softly in pain, the burn marks and blood on her uniform obvious, close to her hip. Serious but still survivable, though they won’t know right away if the shot hit bone, Bodhi thinks. He plants himself down by Tierra’s body, opposite Ilan. The soldier who’d called them over glances towards Tierra for only a split second, her white-blond braids swinging, before biting her lip and re-loading her grenade launcher, aiming again.

“You’re okay, we’re here,” Ilan murmurs, a gentling hand on Tierra’s forehead while she tries to move Tierra’s filthy, bloody uniform top out of the way so they can properly see the wound and treat it.

Bodhi grabs Tierra’s hand as Ilan lifts away the fabric. Tierra’s grip is tight to the point of painful but at least she’s completely conscious — under the wrong conditions, blaster wounds to the abdomen can be as fatal as chest shots, though they kill slowly instead of instantaneously. When Ilan’s managed to expose the burnt flesh and fresh blood, Bodhi slips his hand free of Tierra’s grip to ransack his kit for the species-appropriate antiseptic, and quickly tipping the expanding gel onto a cleaning wipe.

“This is gonna sting,” he says, though he knows it’s an understatement.

This time her pain is entirely in her open-mouthed grimace. Ilan immediately doses her with a painkiller, slapping the patch haphazardly on her strained neck. Bodhi pulls out a bandage, carefully covering the wound.

“Can we _move_ her? Can we please move her?” asks the soldier next to them. “I’ll cover you.”

Ilan nods once, quickly, and Bodhi’s already pulling out the small square of his compressed stretcher. He’s just hit the expand button when suddenly there comes a whizz of artillery fire and wall of a building some hundred feet in front of the a cry goes up from an alley in front of them..

“Medic!” The voice is shot through with panic.

Ilan looks at Bodhi. “You’ve got her. Get her back to the ship,” she says. It’s all said as a declaration, unquestioning in its certainty, and if it weren’t for the fact that they’ve got Storm Troopers firing at them, that might feel important, momentous. Then Ilan is gone, boots on rocky pavement, weaving her way through blaster fire and leaving Bodhi to marshal a path back to the troop carrier.  

“Okay, okay,” Bodhi says, hoping his voice isn’t shaking. “We’re going to get her on this stretcher and then you cover us back to the troop carrier,” he tells the pale-haired soldier with her grenade launcher. “It’s the stretcher we’ve got to be worried about. It’ll keep pace with us but it can’t maneuver that fast.”

“Understood,” the soldier replies, packing away her hefty grenade launcher so it’s slung across her back. Then she helps Bodhi heft Corporal Tierra onto the stretcher. When the soldier unholsters her blaster, Bodhi nods.

“Now!” he says, slapping the hover function on the stretcher on. And they run, weaving their way back behind the improvised the sporadic blaster fire grazing close enough that Bodhi’s blood is pounding in his ears.

Finally, the troop carrier’s in sight, and whoever’s with it must spot them because the drop-plank hits the ground, dust rising, as they make it around the last bend in the road.

“Help us lock the stretcher in!” Bodhi calls to the soldier standing guard with his blaster drawn. Then, seconds later, the ground shifts from dusty, broken pavement to the echoing metal of the ship. Together, the three of them pull the stretcher in. The two soldiers yank up the built-in wall clamps and Bodhi pushes the side of stretcher until it clicks in, grunting from the effort.

Tierra hisses through her teeth at the jolt and Bodhi tries to push her hair out of her face, wishes his hands were cleaner.

“I’ve got to go back,” the blond soldier says, but she looks down at Tierra and squeezes her hand once, quickly, and leans down to whisper, “We’ll get you out of here. You just hang on.”

The soldier on guard follows her out, checking his comm, which crackles to life as he exits, but Bodhi’s concentrating, quickly disinfecting his hands with gel and checks Tierra’s bandages — there’s more blood, but it doesn’t look like their run back to the ship jostled her too much.

The minutes pass strangely with the two of them alone now in the troop carrier, serenaded by the sounds of still ongoing firefight. Tierra’s quiet now, lulled into something like sleep by the painkillers, though she’s still wearing a frown. Bodhi wishes he could do a proper check of her ribs, but there’s nothing to be done but to wait until they’re back on base.

Then there’s a massive explosion off towards where the Mercantile Association building is. It’s large enough that for a split second Bodhi can see the debris bursting into the air from the open troop carrier. Without thinking Bodhi ducks down over Tierra, one arm splayed around across her torso, his other hand flying up to cover the back of his vulnerable neck — his body remembering without his mind. This is what he would’ve done on Jedha. He’s been better trained since, at the Academy and on Heron Base, but when that split-second of terror takes over, his muscles tell him, _get down and cover; pull anyone to the ground with you_ like he’s eight and the young occupation is beginning to burn in its growing pains.

Tierra’s eyes fly open again and she grabs out for him, hands clamping around Bodhi’s arm, like she’s ready to sit up and shove him down, out of the line of fire. She’ll be a good officer one day, if she gets the chance.  

“Shhh, just lie down,” Bodhi says, as if silence could hide them if anyone came looking — he could fly the ship if they had to get away, but the turrets require someone else behind them and they’d be abandoning Ilan and the rest of the ground forces. “I think that was ours,” he says. He hopes it was.

Then the sound of boots, lots of them, pounding their way over. Bodhi’s unarmed. Tierra’s long since lost her weaponry and isn’t in any shape to do any fighting regardless.

But then Bodhi looks back and it’s Ilan at the front of the pack, leading a floating stretcher of her own. Behind her and besides her, are the unit, still firing their blasters back toward the burning streets of the town.

“Let’s go, come on, come on,” cries Captain de Aron, somewhere behind Ilan.

She comes swinging up into the troop carrier — the stretcher’s carrying a male Mon Calamari soldier, but that’s all Bodhi can ascertain before the soldiers start pouring their way in. At a glance, Bodhi thinks that’s everyone but what if there’s a face that’s slipped from his mind?

A Rodian soldier collapses on the floor by the wounded Mon Calamari, pressing his forehead against the edge of the stretcher near the unconscious soldier’s head. Then the flood of bodies obscures the stretcher and its business from Bodhi’s line of sight.

“What’s his status? Do you need me?” Bodhi shuffles over through the crowd of sweaty, breathing bodies toward Ilan, who’s still bent over her patient. The ship’s engine rumbles, the ship vibrating with its awakening.

“Shrapnel to the thigh. I cleaned out the debris, but I’m pretty sure the wound’s deeper than I first thought,” Ilan says, shaking her head. “You have extra expanding cellulose bandages? I already used mine and I’m gonna have to change them before we get back to base. He’s still bleeding.”

Bodhi nods, stumbling back toward his kit — they’re taking off now, the ship tilting precariously in its sharp climb, so he’s fighting his way upward towards his own set-up on the opposite side of the carrier.

“Strap in, everyone!” comes the command from the cockpit, but Bodhi only half hears it in the midst of his ransacking search.

He rummages quickly, pulling out a syringe applicator sealed in wrapping. Around him, the soldiers are rapidly strapping themselves into the seats built into the bulkheads — the Rodian soldier is craning his head sideways, still keeping watch over Ilan’s patient from afar now — but Bodhi pushes down towards Ilan and her patient. The ship abruptly veers to the side and Bodhi slams shoulder-first back into the bulkhead behind him. Ilan looks up sharply and the nearest soldier hisses through his teeth and reaches to unclip himself and help, but Bodhi shakes his head.

“I’m fine,” he grits out, pushing back off the bulkhead and skidding his way over, brandishing the syringe of cellulose bandaging.

Ilan grabs the syringe off him and shoos Bodhi off to the free seat by Tierra’s stretcher. They careen out past breathable air into the black of space, leaving the blaster fire well behind them.

“Prepare for hyperspace jump,” Captain declares on the comms, but Bodhi’s barely listening, clipping himself into the seat by Tierra’s stretcher.

“You still with me?” he asks Tierra softly. Her jaw is clenched tightly and there are tears on her face. “It’s too soon to give you another painkiller, but the ship’ll even out in hyperspace.”

Tierra nods, once, and then there’s the odd sensation — physical but also somehow temporal — of hyperspace. They’re out.

Once they’re in the relative safety of hyperspace, the soldiers unclip themselves, check each other over for any trackers they might’ve picked up, and Bodhi and Ilan clean their dirty cuts and investigate their blooming bruises. They’d come with a unit of fifteen — they’re returning with fourteen, including the two in stretcher.

“Lieutenant Windchild set the charges in the Mercantile Association building. She must have been delayed on her way out. The building went down,” Captain de Aron says, making eye contact dead-on with Ilan and Bodhi — this is one of many times he will have to share this news.

Bodhi tries to remember what Lieutenant Windchild looked like, if he’d ever seen her before today. Ilan nods and claps de Aron on the upper arm.

“Sit down and let me clean that cut,” she says, pointing to his temple.

Bodhi turns to the next soldier — a young human man with twisting vine tattoos that spread down to the backs of his hands. “Shooting pain in the left shoulder, you said?” Bodhi inquires.

They come out of hyperspace to the sight of Chaladh Two orbiting green-yellow-blue in front of them. From this perspective, you’d never guess there’s a war, Bodhi thinks.

“Med bay, prepare to receive wounded,” Ilan calls into the comm. “One human female, blaster shot to the abdomen. One Mon Calamari male, shrapnel wound in the thigh.”

The waiting is over now; the action picks up where it left off — they’ve managed to tide their patients over through the return trip. Bodhi’s blood pumps with the same adrenaline as when he was running through the streets.

As they swoop in through the atmosphere, the scene out the viewports settles into a typical Chaladh night — a nearly uninterrupted textured darkness, courtesy of the heavy vegetation and lack of large settlements. Chaladh One’s yellow-green overhead is the only respite from the loneliness until abruptly, the coastline’s bioluminescence and the lit-up landing bays of Heron Base reveal themselves.

When the troop carrier lands, Una and Ess-Seven Cue are there, rushing up the ramp the moment the ship doors unseal. Automatically, Bodhi grabs the open side of Tierra’s stretcher, forcing it out of the holders and smacking on the hover function on. Tierra’s fallen back into a fitful sleep, but she’s starting to frown and blink at the commotion of sound and movement.

“Blaster wound to the abdomen, about an inch above the hip,” he tells Ess-Seven, who’s grabbed the other side of the stretcher to guide it down the ramp. “No indication it hit bone but I am concerned the angle of her fall means she’s also got bruised ribs on the left side.”

The path to the med bay is cleared of people and they are running. The sun is bright overhead as they rush across the landing bay to the swinging doors of the emergency room. Tierra mutters, “What —?”

“Stay still, stay still,” he tells Tierra. “You’re okay. You’re back on base, we’re almost to the med bay right now.” She’s hovering somewhere close to consciousness again and making a low groaning noise. Just behind them, Ilan is barking her summary of her patient’s status.

Then they’re through the doors and Bodhi’s still carried by the momentum of it, the thump of his heart. He almost forgets for a moment, means to follow.

“Bodhi,” Ilan says, hand grabbing his elbow. “We’re covered in mud.”

“Right,” Bodhi says, letting out a breath and watching the stretchers both disappear — Ess-Seven Cue guiding Tierra’s towards a treatment room with an already prepared bacta tank and the echo of Una’s feet, guiding the second stretcher into Operating Theater One. “Right, yeah.”

“Come on,” Ilan says, very gentle. “We need to clean up.”

Bodhi spends longer than strictly necessary in the shower — real water, because of the many coursing rivers that flood into the ocean not far from base.

“We’re off-rotation tomorrow,” Ilan says, when he joins her in the changing rooms.

“Okay,” Bodhi agrees.

“Reports for the Chief due at the beginning of second rotation, though,” Ilan follows up, coming over closer now.

Bodhi nods and sit down on the one of the benches. His exhaustion floods over him suddenly, now that it is no longer held back by will and necessity.

Ilan rests a hand on his shoulder. “You did good today. Get some sleep.”

“I will,” Bodhi promises.

And he does — the moment he enters his quarters, his short hair still damp at the tips, he automatically makes for his bed and he’s asleep so fast he never even feels sleep creeping up on him. It swallows him whole.

He only wakes because of the familiar buzzing by his ear. Bodhi blindly reaches for his comm, not sure how long he’s slept — the light coming in the window’s changed, brighter now, so it’s been hours at the very least — but certain it hasn’t been enough. His sealed med bay line has a message. He taps in his code rapidly and reads. _Cpl Tierra out of bacta tank for today. Prognosis good. Sgt Jangir recovering from reconstructive surgery_ says the message from Ess-Seven Cue. Bodhi falls back onto the bed and stares at the ceiling. Blows a long heavy breath out. Falls back into sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the next chapter will probably take some more time to post, but hopefully not a many month hiatus again!


	4. Asclepius

It’s hours later still when the door bangs open and violent light fills Bodhi’s protesting vision. Jyn’s standing in front of him, silhouetted against the sunlight with her hands on her hips.

“Come on then, get up,” she declares.

“Jyn, please,” Bodhi nearly begs, lifting his head and regretting it immediately. “I’m still so bloody tired. All I want to do is sleep.”

“Oh, stop complaining,” Jyn says, striding over and clapping him on the arm. “Let’s go.”

“Jyn,” Bodhi says, sitting up reluctantly and rubbing at his face. “What is so important? I spent yesterday sprinting away from blaster fire. I’m tired. I promise I’m not having a breakdown because I want a nap.”

Jyn studies him, her lips pursed, her hands coming up to rest on her hips. “Nela Sandskimmer’s back,” she says.

“Right. Okay,” Bodhi says, squinting at Jyn.

It isn’t that they’ve never _seen_ Nela Sandskimmer in the months since she got them off Scarif — occasionally Bodhi’s spotted her sitting with Una on the beach, hands gesticulating, heads tipped back in laughter — but they’ve never had a proper conversation.

“Are we planning to . . . ambush her or something?” Bodhi asks. “Seems rude.”

Jyn rolls her eyes. “We’re going to introduce ourselves.”

“Yeah, but what’ll we say?” Bodhi asks, sliding his legs over the edge of the bed, the cool of the tiles against his feet bringing him definitively into the waking world. “Hello there, remember that time you picked our semi-conscious bodies off that beach?”

“Or something a bit less awkward,” Jyn replies, crossing her arms.

“Alright, fine. Is Cassian coming with us?” Bodhi asks, standing and rolling his shoulders out. He’s not sure if he’s hoping Cassian can be a tempering agent or not — it’s a possibility, but an unlikely one.

Jyn glances past him to the window, but then sits down on her own bed and tells him, “He’s not on base. He and Kaytoo left on a mission this morning,” Bodhi pulls on some clean clothes.

Bodhi turns around to check her expression — pinched in between the eyebrows for a moment but then cool, implacable. That’s one ability she might have inherited from Galen — Bodhi had always found him to be preternaturally calm for someone out to commit treason on the grandest possible scale.

“When will they be back?” Bodhi asks. They’ve disappeared off for unknown purposes a few times before — with Jyn once, too, but that had only lasted a day or two. Cassian and Kay are trained for marathons of deception, inciting and enticing in turn, and when they leave together, it could mean anything.

“Isn’t that always the question,” Jyn replies flatly.

“They’ll be alright,” Bodhi says, though now more than ever he knows there’s no way he can promise that.

Jyn nods at him, but it’s an acknowledgment of his own concern more than her believing him, Bodhi can tell. He wishes for a perhaps ungenerous moment that Jyn prayed, that she had something to fall back on as he does. Then she taps her kyber crystal against her collarbone, an unconscious tic he’s started noticing since they came to Chaladh. It was her mother’s gift, she’d told him once, so late at night it was already crawling towards dawn. She very rarely shares anything about her mother, but the chain is constant around her neck.

“Okay, I’m ready,” Bodhi announces, smoothing down his rumpled shirt.

“Then let’s go,” Jyn decides.

They’re both quiet on the walk over, the distant screech of seabirds above them.

“Do you see her?” Bodhi asks, scanning the mess hall when they get through the swinging double doors. “How do you know she’s in here, anyway?”

“There,” Jyn nods suddenly, grabbing his wrist and tugging him forward.

“Where?” Bodhi asks, swiveling his head and trying to follow.

“Just come with me,” Jyn says impatiently, nodding minutely and then immediately walking off in that direction. Bodhi hurries to follow and that’s when he finally catches sight of Nela Sandskimmer.  

She’s at a small, round corner table, by a pair of open windows, sitting opposite Luke. Both of them are leaning in, elbows on the table. Luke’s plate looks untouched, but Nela’s got her chopsticks tangled in a half-full bowl of noodles, an open container of chili oil and a plate of hoarded fruit nearby.

“Pardon,” Jyn says — this is, Bodhi can’t help but note, maybe the politest he’s ever heard her. “Are you Lieutenant Sandskimmer?”

“Oh, hey,” Luke says, softly, sitting up and taking them in. His cheeks are blotchy red and his eyes are suspiciously watery. He turns away and blinks quickly.  

“Hey,” Bodhi murmurs back, questions building.

Overlapping with him though, Nela agrees, “That’s me!” with a bright-sharp smile that’s directed mostly at Jyn. It’s enough, though, to distract. Nela’s hard not to look at.

She’s got a hint of engine grease on her cheek and her short, tight black curls are helmet-mussed. They should be putting her on the propaganda posters, Bodhi thinks. It’d probably work a hundred times better than the faintly unsettling artistic remakes of his Imperial Wanted posters that the Rebel counter-propagandists occasionally manage to flash across the Holonet _(Wanted: Courage, Remembrance, Liberty_ they read, the words painted over his face).

“We’re —” Jyn begins, but Nela cuts in before she can finish.

“You’re Andor’s people. The ones who stole the plans. I know who you are,” she says, gesturing them closer, waving her chopsticks. “You’re a hard bunch to forget.”

Luke manages to pull out something that, physically at least, resembles a smile. “You should sit down with us,” he offers.

Jyn nods slightly, a gesture with the self-possession of a dignitary. Bodhi sits down beside her.

“Did you know,” Luke adds, clearing his throat, “Nela’s from Tatooine, too.”

“Imagine that,” Jyn says, eyebrows rising slightly.

“That’s the secret. You’ll find us everywhere,” Nela says, smiling briefly at Luke, a muted thing with no teeth showing. “We’re a hardy bunch. Desert kids usually are, huh?” she adds, looking at Bodhi now.

Bodhi blinks and nods. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Guess we know how to manage.”

Nela looks at Bodhi and Jyn both in turn, eye-to-eye. “You both look good. Healthy,” she observes, with a solid nod. “I’m glad.”

“Well, it’s thanks to you that we’re here at all,” Bodhi responds.

“Not that I’m one for being overly humble,” Nela grins, “but there were a few other people involved, as I remember.”

“And without all of you,” Jyn says, mouth set, “we’d have died. It’s worth — it’s worth acknowledging. We’ve met the others now but we hadn’t met you.”

Nela’s eyebrows climb upwards, but without any particular urgency, forehead wrinkling slightly. “Right. Well, like I said, happy to see you all doing well. And I hear you’re all up to uh . . . _productive_ activities of one sort or the other.”

Jyn smirks. “I have a certain skill set,” she replies, steepling her fingers.

Nela grins. “Me, too,” she says, dark eyes sparkling. “I mean, of course, nothing on your scale,” she holds up a palm respectfully, “but I may have lightened the pockets of some of Mos Espa’s denizens, back in the day. Look at your face,” she crows, stabbing her chopsticks in Luke’s direction.

When Bodhi shifts his attention, Luke’s lips are pressed together in an unimpressed line but at Nela’s comment, his face quickly dissolves into an abbreviated eyeroll — not nearly as potent as the ones Princess Leia levels at Solo, but a kind of watered-down descendent nevertheless.

Bodhi laughs and to his surprise, Jyn nearly does, too, teeth flashing in an open-mouthed grin.

“Well. Mos Espa’s terrible,” Luke mutters, but he’s smiling slightly.

“I’ve been,” Jyn says, which Bodhi didn’t know — he should’ve gotten over being surprised by Jyn by now but he’s not. “Can’t say I disagree with that assessment.”

“Who would?” Nela asks blithely. “It’s a total shithole. Still home, though,” she shrugs. “Can’t help where you’re from.”

Bodhi loves (present tense, still) Jedha in complicated ways, a love heavy with the insidious weight of occupation, a love veined with fear and resentment and confusion, but he’s never felt anything like Nela’s bright and laughing bitterness.

“No,” Jyn agrees. She meets Nela’s eyes and nods slightly.

Nela taps a finger against her bowl and then pushes her plate of fruit to center of the table. “Take some,” she declares to them all. “It’s good for you.”

* * *

The next day, after his rotation, Bodhi has an appointment with Kalonia.

“I got sent out, day before yesterday. With de Aron’s squad and Ilan,” Bodhi says. Kalonia probably knows that; the med bay keeps precise shared calendars — or as precise as the imprecision of war allows — to make sure everyone’s where they need to be.  

“Yes,” Kalonia agrees. “It was your first time in the field, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. It was a pretty heavy firefight,” Bodhi says, pressing a finger into the armrest, tracing the raised pattern of it. “And they lost a lieutenant.”

“I heard that,” Kalonia agrees, with solemn eyes. “Would you tell me what happened?”

Bodhi rubs at his neck. “I don’t know the details. We weren’t there. A building collapsed on her. She was setting the charges.”

“Your first loss in the field can be difficult, whether or not you witnessed it personally,” Kalonia replies, shifting slightly, leaning in towards Bodhi. Her hair brushes over her chin with the motion.

“That —” Bodhi casts around for the right words. “That wasn’t the part that bothered me."

“But something bothered you,” Kalonia offers.

“My instinct to turn to the next thing, it was so _fast_ ,” Bodhi settles on and it’s not quite right, not quite what he’s trying to get at but it’s a start. “I — there wasn’t anything we could’ve done even if we were out there. I mean, that’s what I thought when de Aron told us. That we couldn’t have saved her anyway, so —” Bodhi stumbles, searching for words that will neither condemn nor soften.

Kalonia nods, hands resting lightly on her lap.

“I guess that’s . . . that’s what’s making me uncomfortable,” Bodhi confesses. “That I’ve already figured out how to, I don’t know, turn off the awfulness and only see the things right in front of me. I know I need to concentrate, but I don’t want become . . . callous, I guess.”

Kalonia is quiet for a long beat, her brown eyes focused almost uncomfortably on Bodhi’s face. “Compassion and focus aren’t necessarily opposed to each other,” she finally says. “And you’re right — we do need both. But what that looks like in context, in the field? It isn’t always what we might wish. We work in a profession with limitations.” She threads her fingers together and takes a deep, steady breath. “The dead are beyond the reach of our abilities and knowledge. But we can still ease the pain of living, address their ailments. I’m not suggesting you forget loss. Done well, though, concentrating on the living is still an act of care.”

Bodhi shifts his gaze to the floor, the leg of Kalonia’s chair, and nods. Swallows back against the ache in his throat. “Yeah,” he finally says, when he trusts his voice. “It’s just . . . more complicated than I expected.”

“I know,” Kalonia agrees softly. “When I was starting out, those were questions I struggled with. There’s reading I could recommend. It can help, I think, to really look at the problem from different angles.”

“Okay,” Bodhi agrees.

He walks out with a list — handwritten on paper, an old-fashioned medium — folded and tucked into the breast pocket of his scrubs. He taps at it with two fingers, to feel the faint crinkle of it beneath cloth, and then straightens his shoulders and walks out through the med bay’s swinging doors.

* * *

“If you need to talk about it, being in the field,” Una offers a couple days later, as they’re both charting at the medic’s station, “I’m here.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bodhi agrees, because it’s Una and of course he could talk to her. “I’m okay. It’s just the bigger questions that I’m still working on, I guess,” He scratches at the back of his neck. “Kalonia gave me some things to read. I think it’s, uh, helping me slow down a bit? You know, think about stuff without —” Bodhi pauses, thinking of how to fill that in.

“Tripping over yourself?” Una offers, pensive. “That was what I needed my bioethics classes for, back in university, anyway. I was a very . . . righteous nineteen year old.”

Bodhi looks up from his datapad, over to her and grins. “Yeah, I can see it.”

Una clicks her tongue at him but then continues quietly, “It was terribly confusing for me, then, realizing one couldn’t just _arrive_ at the exact right answer of how or when to act, in medicine.”

Bodhi runs his teeth over his lower lip for a second, looking at his unfinished charting and says, “Kalonia felt like it was good — progress, maybe? That I came in wanting to talk to her about it. She told me that maybe I should talk about the reading she gave me with Yalthai in lessons. Actually, I’ve been thinking, Yalthai’d probably be quite pleased.”

“They are both rather philosophical about practicing medicine, aren’t they,” Una says, closer to a thoughtful statement than a question.

“Erm, but everyone here’s like that a bit,” Bodhi points out. It’s one among a number of reasons this is a change from flying for the Empire — there’s the physical differences of living, breathing, bleeding bodies instead of the coils and engines of ships, but there’s also this: questions and complications and re-adjusting treatment plans in place of orders followed, with blinders comfortingly on.

“Blame the Chief,” Una replies cheerfully.

* * *

The next two weeks in the med bay are relatively slow, with no real battles or major skirmishes to clean up after. They get the regular scrapes and burns of the mechanics and engineers, the training ground bruises and pulled muscles and odd broken bone from their soldiers and pilots, a sit-and-wait stomach virus running its way through the comms officers who got sent off on some Core-ward mission.

Ordinarily, the med bay thrives in chaos, does its best and most vital work in crisis, but Bodhi has to admit that for once he doesn’t mind having the time to actually get through whole lessons with Ilan and Yalthai without them or him getting called away to be an extra pair of hands, another brain to add to the mix.

It can’t stay that way, of course. It’s Miansday, about fifteen minutes into first rotation, and Bodhi’s checking charts when everyone’s comm lines light up.

“Urgent medical response to landing bay three,” the ops officer relays. “Rampant Squadron’s on their way in and it sounds like Captain Antilles’s ship is,” the comm line crackles, “on fire.”

Yalthai whips her head up, head tresses swinging. Then she nods quickly at Una, who’s already half out of her chair, and at Bodhi, responding into her comm, “Understood. Mustering medical response now.” Turning to Bodhi and Una, she says, “Get your fire-resistant gear on.”

Bodhi and Una pull on their gear as quickly as possible. Bodhi can feel his heart rate ramping up in anticipation; he forces himself to take a steadying breath and then slots the tubes for his emergency re-breather in properly. He wishes Ilan were here with them, not prepping for surgery with the Chief. She’s reassuring, with her earned and focused calm.

But it’s Una he follows out to the landing bay. Everyone out there is staring up at the sky and it’s immediately obvious why.

Coming down ahead of the rest of Rampant Squadron is the shivering mass of an X-Wing, wings aflame. It’s careening unevenly closer and closer to base, the fire only seeming to grow — it must be eating away at the engines by now.

“Holy saints,” Una whispers, “how’s he going to land that thing?”

The comms officer presses her palms harder against her headphones. “Rampant Three, talk to me! Will you be able to do an emergency landing?” She shakes her head at the burly Sullustan ground control officer, Captain Sund. “I’m losing him. There’s too much static interference and the tracking’s completely off. We don’t know what his plan is, or if he’s even in control!”

“Then we must be calm!” Sund says — or Bodhi’s pretty sure that’s what he says, but his Sullustan is rusty —  holding up a hand. “We will have to trust Antilles! But also run the calculations on where he is likely to end up!”

The comms officer nods, flicks a switch and starts issuing instructions for the Command Center, but Bodhi can’t look away from the sky, the disaster that’s on the brink of unfolding. Two other X-Wings are trying to catch up with Antilles’ wild dive, figure out what’s going on.

The blood thrumming in his veins, Bodhi glances back and forth between the burning X-Wing and the ground, running through the possibilities, the trajectories, what he’d do if he were the one in the cockpit right now. Antilles won’t be able to make the landing bay, not without skidding and plowing through the people and ships out here. And he must know that, because the ship’s juddering away towards —

“The water!” Bodhi bursts out, reaching out and tapping at Captain Sund’s shoulder. “Look at the way he’s trying to angle away from the base. He’s gonna crash land in the water. We need one of the rafts!”

Sund looks up, eyes flitting between Bodhi and the comms officer. The comms officer shakes her head helplessly.

“We need to hurry!” Una insists.

“Head to the pier! I will navigate! We will launch immediately!” Sund declares.

And then they’re all rushing down to the only recently constructed pier. Sund drops into the raft first, heading to the front to run the engine. Bodhi follows, puts a steadying hand on Una’s ribs as she clambers in behind.

“Let’s go!” Una yells up at Sund, her eyes locked on the rapidly descending X-Wing.

It’s growing larger and larger, ever closer to the indifferent ocean. Sund pulls them out into the still calm waters, so that they’re chasing the shadow of the X-Wing. Then the waves are rising violent around the ship’s downward hurtling body, the sound of the impact seeming to surround them. Reactionary waves swell, rattling the raft. Bodhi has to grab onto the railing to keep from slipping over, saltwater stinging his eyes, but then the split second passes, and he’s in jerky automatic motion again — _get the patient out of danger_.

Bodhi slips on his enhanced sight goggles and pulls his re-breather up over his nose and mouth and besides him, Una’s doing the same, and then Bodhi’s diving into the water a split second behind her. The world goes aquamarine, the disturbed pulse of waves trying to win out over the efforts of his body.

Below them, the ship is sinking. The canopy opens, sluggish and resistant, and there’s Antilles, fighting his way out of the cockpit, thrashing. His crash webbing’s caught on something. Bodhi fights the shoreward push of the waves to get closer, as Una propels herself further down, a metallic flash by her fisted hand telling Bodhi she’s got her trauma shears out. Bodhi gets close enough to sling Antilles’ arm over his shoulders and then there’s a sudden easing that tells him Una’s cut the crash webbing free. Bodhi kicks for the surface, pulling Antilles with him. Then their heads burst up over the waves. Bodhi pulls off his re-breather one handed, taking a cold, gritty gasp of natural air, grateful when Una emerges and helps push Antilles over the railing onto the raft.

He rolls heavily onto his side with the momentum, but then for a heart-stopping moment, he’s utterly still. Una hefts herself onto the raft, ready to start pumping his chest. Bodhi’s still in the water up to his neck, his veins going cold. Then Antilles starts coughing violently, spitting up seawater on the bottom of the raft.

“There we go,” Una says, letting out a heavy sigh of relief, her re-breather dangling half-detached by her collar bone.

Bodhi clambers up onto the raft himself, muscles tight from exertion. Overhead, the seabirds call to each other, hoarse and circling. Bodhi pulls off his goggles, tightens his focus back down to this raft, the one body in his care. Lifted out of the strange warped light of the ocean, the splotchy, blistering burns seared across Antilles’ shoulders and neck are evident. While Una gets Antilles upright, resting against against her chest, and checks his vitals, Bodhi cracks open his response kit, digging out temporary bandages.

Sund veers the raft around, back toward base. “We are in bound!” he yells into his comm. “Captain Antilles has been recovered!”

“That was . . . fucking terrible,” Antilles says hoarsely, clutching at Una’s upper arm. Una winces minutely — his grip looks tight.  

“Yeah, I can imagine,” Bodhi says, getting a closer look at Antilles’ left shoulder — the flight suit fabric there’s melted into the skin, a solar flare of orange woven into the swollen red-white blisters. In his gear, on a moving raft, Bodhi hasn’t got the manual dexterity to slough off the fabric layer without taking off epidermal tissue as well. So he bites his lip and gingerly, loosely applies the temporary bandages.

Despite Bodhi’s care, Antilles gasps at the contact, wide-eyed. This close to him, Bodhi can clearly hear the heavy breathing that follows, even with the raft’s engine thrumming.

“Well, you had the good sense to put out the fire yourself, so that’s made our job a bit easier, hasn’t it,” Una says, voice light and easy. “We’ll have you to the med bay in no time. You’re alright.”

“This doesn’t fucking feel alright,” Antilles retorts, but it’s indistinct and he’s starting to shiver, tremors building from his gut up. Behind him, Una nods towards Bodhi’s open kit and Bodhi nods quickly back.

“Let’s get this wrapped around you,” Bodhi says, untucking and expanding his kit’s shock blanket.

Ess Seven-Cue’s there waiting for them on the pier, with a floating stretcher. “Exam room four. Dr. Yalthai’s ready for us,” he says.

Antilles grimaces and turns his face away as Bodhi grabs under his arms to haul him from the raft onto the stretcher.

Ess Seven leads the way, hauling the stretcher with his superior strength, while Una keeps up a litany of soothing, cheerful chatter.

“Here we go, the med bay’s right there now! A little jostling can’t be that hard compared to — what you were up to this time?” she asks.

“Taking out a munitions complex,” Antilles says — the accompanying smile is more a predatory flash of teeth than a sign of joy. “Little gift for the system’s piece-of-shit governor.”

“I’m sure it was much appreciated,” Una replies, as they get through the open doorway of the examination room.

“Captain,” Yalthai says, motioning for them to help Antilles up onto the examining table. “Looks like you had quite the run-in.” She’s got that now familiar assessing expression on her face, forehead furrowed, eyes moving rapidly over Antilles’ burns.

Antilles looks at her balefully for a split second and then abruptly scrambles for the garbage can, and wretches up the contents of his stomach, his dripping hair falling forward over his face.

“That should make you feel a bit better,” Yalthai says serenely.  

Antilles looks up, his eyes narrowed and his mouth set in a tight, wavering line.

“Some water and two human-standard doses of _asteraphine_ for him, please, Bodhi? And tell Ess Seven to get the bacta tank prepared for immersion,” Yalthai requests. She glances over Antilles’ burns and as he’s hurrying out, Bodhi hears her say, “Now we’re going to try to remove your flight suit. We’re going to have to cut it off, I think.”

Bodhi signals Ess Seven to prepare for a bacta immersion and comes back in with water and painkillers for Antilles. Una and Yalthai have him stripped down to his underwear and the ripped up, singed remains of his flight suit are strewn across the floor. Antilles gulps down the water and pills like that, his dark hair still damp and plastered to his forehead.

Ess Seven gets him ready for bacta immersion while Yalthai programs the tank for burn treatment.

Una and Bodhi finally get out of their fire-resistant gear and wash the briney coarseness out of their hair. When they emerge from the changing rooms, Ess Seven informs them in a weary tone that Commander Daen y Cazal has already commed the med bay twice to ask for updates.

They pull Antilles back out of the tank a couple hours later, sponge off the excess bacta stuck in his hair. Yalthai comes in to inspect his progress and applies his bandages herself, quizzing Bodhi about how to identify different levels of burn damage as she works.

“The good news is that the bacta’s worked well,” Yalthai tells Antilles, though she’s nevertheless rather pinched between her wide, dark eyes. “You shouldn’t have scars, but the bandages will need changing and we’ll have to make sure you don’t dislodge them up in your sleep. Try to sleep on your stomach, if you can.”

“Right. So what time d’you want me back tomorrow, then?” Antilles asks, blinking himself back into something resembling wakefulness.

“Where is it you think you’ll be going?” Yalthai asks. Bodhi thinks the corner of her eye is twitching. He hadn’t actually known that was possible. It’s sort of fascinating. “We have to keep you here in the med bay under observation for at least another day!”

“Are you certain that’s absolutely necessary, Doctor?” Antilles asks.

Yalthai stares at him. “Have you acquired mammalian-species medical training since the last time you were in here — what was it? Thirteen days ago?”

“It was a scratch,” Antilles says weakly, the armored formality of his speech immediately seeping away.

“You might benefit from some genuine field medic training. It might make you less cavalier,” Yalthai mutters, which Bodhi thinks is severely underestimating the flight craziness of starfighter pilots.

“Okay, well, can I be observed in the mess hall at least?” Antilles groans. “I’m suddenly starving. With being in the bacta tank, I don’t think I’ve eaten in at least a day.”

“No,” Yalthai says simply. “You’ll stay here and we’ll have food brought to you.”

“Bee-Nine could keep an eye on me,” Antilles offers hopefully.

“Your astromech droid is highly capable of many tasks, Captain, but overseeing your medical condition is not one of them,” Yalthai says.

“I just — I need to see the squadron,” Antilles says, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed.

“Antilles, please,” Yalthai says — it’s as close to snapping as Bodhi’s ever heard from her. “I need you to think about this sensibly. The med bay is as close to a sterile location as can exist on this base, and we can’t risk your burns getting infected. You were already dunked in an ocean we know is teeming with microorganisms.”

Bodhi clears his throat and interjects, “But also, we’re, um, we’re not restricting visitors? Your squadron can just come see you. So, that won’t be an issue.”

“Okay,” Antilles says, blinking.   

“That was all you wanted? You could’ve just said that,” Yalthai says, throwing up her hands. “If you’re looking to check in with your fellow pilots, then yes, fine, we’ll bring them _here_. Contact Commander Daen y Cazal and let her know he’s out of the tank,” she tells Una, who nods and ducks out.

“Do I get a say in any of this?” Antilles asks, dry.

“As I recall, Captain, you wanted your squadron and we’ve just ensured that they’ll be here,” Yalthai says, with a single glance up from her datapad. “Now, please eat and stay _off_ your feet.”

“Yeah, sure. Always a real pleasure to see you, Doc,” Antilles says, finally easing himself fully back onto the bed.

Yalthai studies at him for a brief moment, lips pursed. “It’s my job to keep you healthy and alive,” she says, “and I do that proudly. I realize you and I do not always . . . approach your treatment with the same priorities. Contrary to what you may believe, I do respect that. You are my patient and I want to see you well, now and in the future.”

Antilles meets Yalthai’s gaze for a long moment, and then looks down at his hands folded in his lap and nods, once. “Understood, sir,” he says, quiet but clear. “I, um, I do appreciate,” he gestures vaguely towards his neck, “all of this. And you guys not letting me drown.”

Yalthai sticks her hands in the pockets of her physician’s robes. “You keep doing your job and we’ll keep doing ours,” she says, sweeping out of the room.

Bodhi follows Yalthai out, but the image of Antilles’s bent head lingers in his subconscious, recurs in his fragmented dreams that night.

* * *

The next day when Bodhi gets to Antilles’s room during rounds, he enters just moments before Rampant Squadron suddenly piles in.

Lyrrin Zoa, a Mirallian pilot, is the first to slip into the room, concern evident on her face. She takes the seat closest to Antilles’ bed, patting his hand once quickly. Behind trails the rest of the squadron, a whole handful of whooping pilots, with clean fatigues and lounging limbs.

“Lookin’ good today, Antilles,” says a human pilot Bodhi doesn’t know, with a wide grin. “These new bandages are _spiffy_.”

Bodhi bites his lower lip and goes back to carefully peeling off the old bandaging on the side of Antilles’ neck.

Antilles, meanwhile, replies dryly, “Hilarious. You’re all master comics.”

A couple of the other pilots laugh; a lieutenant settles cross-legged on the end of the bed, saying, “So we told Ava in the mess hall what happened and she said she’d send you up some _naigen_ pudding, which I hope you’re gonna share.”

As the conversation descends into some kind of competition for Antilles’ still hypothetical pudding, Rampant Squadron’s Commander Daen y Cazal silently comes to stand on the other side of Antilles’ bed, by Bodhi, who’s just moved on the changing to the bandages on Antilles’ left shoulder. The Commander’s taller than Bodhi, with sleek, dark hair pinned back in a way that only emphasizes the severity of her bone structure. Her hands are folded behind her back.

When Bodhi looks up at her, Daen y Cazal gives him a courteous nod. “My compliments to Dr. Yalthai for returning my pilot to health.”

There’s a lot of things he could say to that, but Bodhi decides on the simplest. “I’ll pass that along,” he promises.

Princess Leia walks in then, with Luke by her side. He must’ve only got back from Exeter Squadron’s training exercises recently — he’s been missing from Baze and Chirrut’s staff-fighting lessons for the past couple days and Bodhi’s muscles have not been appreciating the one-on-one attention.

The Rampant Squadron pilots quickly disentangle themselves from their various overlapping and entangled seating arrangements, to give Leia respectful nods. Zoa vacates her chair to give Leia somewhere to sit.

“Your highness,” Bodhi smiles.

“Leia, please,” the princess says, with a measured smile, as she graciously takes the proffered seat. “Captain Antilles, I understand you had quite the dramatic return journey.”

“I suppose you could say that, sir,” Antilles agrees, sitting up stiff and proper and then hissing through his teeth.

“Sit back please, Captain,” Bodhi breaks in, quiet, “I’m still working here.” Antilles’s spine softens.

“I heard you were on fire,” Luke says. He leans forward, a hand on the back of Leia’s chair, to peer at Antilles’ bandaged neck and shoulders. “You crashed into the ocean?”

Antilles scowls. “I wasn’t _personally_ on fire; my ship was. And I’d like to see you do better, with an engine in flames like that.”   

“It was totally wild, sir,” Zoa says, with a kind of manic kind of cheer. “Turned out a TIE fighter got one of those time-delayed explosives on his ship, except we didn’t pick it up, and I swear, when we hit atmo here, it looked like he was a firework.”

“Well, regardless of the aesthetics, it’s good to see that you’re healing, Captain,” Leia adds, eyes sparkling with amusement.

“Thank you,” Antilles replies, quickly adding, “Zoa’s making it out to be much more dramatic than how it actually happened.”

Leia nods graciously, but Luke makes a skeptical sound.

Bodhi tries to hide his smile and announces, “Alright, we’ve got your bandages all switched out, Captain. Everything looks like it’s healing well. I have to head out for the rest of rounds now, but if you need anything, hit the comm and one of us will come. Make sure he’s resting,” he requests of the crowd.

“Certainly,” Daen y Cazal agrees.

Luke throws him on a smile on his way out.

* * *

The following week, at the end of their session, Kalonia suddenly tells him, “I’m ready to sign off on your flight approval. Send in your sim requests.”

Una claps her hands together in delight when Bodhi slides into the medic’s station at beginning of second rotation and tells her.

“Ilan,” she calls. “If we ever get that new shuttle, you might never have to suffer through my flying again, because Bodhi’s going to get his wings back!”

From where she’s examining test results in the attendings’ office, Ilan sends Bodhi a distracted, congratulatory smile.

Bodhi flicks the end of Una’s braid. “I haven’t passed yet, don’t say that. You’re gonna give me evil eye.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Una laughs, pulling up her medallion to kiss it. “Asclepius won’t let that happen now.”

They get a slot scheduled for two days later, at the beginning of second rotation. It’s hardly the first time Bodhi’s been back to the simulators since that revealing disaster. He’s been in with Una and Ilan and the random assortment of soldiers and pilots the Chief somehow press-gangs into being fake patients. They need to practice for the emergency response runs they’ll one day do, assuming they ever get that long-promised shuttle. But until now, he’s always been stuck in the back of the shuttle. It’s usually Una in the pilot’s seat, but Bodhi thinks the change will be good for both of them. Una’s a decent, careful pilot, but not a comfortable one, too tense to take proper advantage of the speed and agility Alliance medical shuttles have.

This time when Bodhi heads into the simulator, just behind Ilan, he takes the pilot’s seat.

He breathes in — the simulator just smells vaguely antiseptic, not like a lived-in, working ship, but by now his brain just thinks _antiseptic, med bay, work_. In its own way, the scent’s become familiar, welcoming. It’s not like how he felt about his old Imperial shuttles, the knowledge of their quirks and how handle them so practiced as to become unconscious, but maybe they’ll meet in the middle one day.

“Beginning pre-launch checks,” he announces, and Ilan nods, throwing him a quick wink before getting down to work. Una raps her knuckles against the back of his seat in friendly solidarity as she heads to make sure their gear is locked in.  

They do three runs. The first simulation is bumpy but successful. Bodhi swerves them out of the way of an incoming missile with a turn so sharp the soldiers in the back, who’re supposed to be pretending to have fallen unconscious, both yelp what Bodhi assumes must be expletives. Behind him, Una’s hand makes a loud slapping sound as she grabs at a handhold. Targeting a medical vessel is a war crime under Imperial law, but they practice like this anyway because they cannot afford to be unprepared.

The second simulation goes better — they manage to hook and tow an A-Wing back to base, evading the lingering dogfight while talking the pilot through an initial concussion self-assessment.

When third simulation resolves around them, it sends a chilly shiver of uncanniness down Bodhi’s spine. They’re supposed to retrieve a wounded X-Wing pilot out of the midst of an ongoing ground battle. He’s waiting for them on a white sand beach, walkers coming through the jungle towards him. 

They don’t land, but hover, Una and Ilan dragging the pilot up off the cheaply holo-imaged beach on the simulator’s outer walls— there’s no real texture, maybe that’s the problem, Bodhi has a split second to think — because the walkers and their targeting systems are growing ever closer.

It’s the simulated fighter squadrons the walkers are trying to hit, but Bodhi’s in the way, a nuisance skittering his way up through the sky. Then it descends over him, the quiet, enclosed feeling he’s been chasing since childhood, one that he’s felt only in elusive snatches since he defected. The smooth, cool sensation of absolute concentration, like his heartbeat and the hum of the engine have merged to keep even time together.

“Alright,” Bodhi murmurs to himself, “okay.”  

He weaves the shuttle through the barrage of fire, jaggedly making his way up and up, until they’re beyond range of the walkers, until the atmosphere disappears and the blackness of space settles around them. Ilan, in the co-pilot’s seat, punches in the calculations and Bodhi makes the hyperspace jump, pulling them into the system where their simulated base is located. The landing is easy, smooth.

“You made it!” Una announces to the X-Wing pilot, as Bodhi rotates his chair, letting himself slip down into a relaxed slump. “Safely ferried back to the haven of the med bay, without bleeding out.”

“Oh!” the pilot says, sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the stretcher. He is absurdly young looking. “Great! That wasn’t so bad. I thought this would be way weirder.”

Una laughs and Ilan shakes her head, but softly, with a smile.

“Well, we appreciate the help,” she responds, getting up, dusting off her cargo pants. “What’s your name again?”

“Dak,” the pilot answers cheerfully, hopping up. “Dak Ralter. I’m the new pilot on Exeter Squadron.”

That makes him Luke’s responsibility, Bodhi figures — the new lieutenants are dropped in, meant to be guided through the fray by the most recently promoted officer ahead of them in the squadron line-up.

“Well, thank you for playing direly wounded pilot for us, Dak Ralter,” Una says, shaking his hand.

“Thank you guys for patching up my fake wounds so nice,” Ralter responds, with an easy grin and a theatrical half bow. Bodhi’s amused despite the churning anxiety in his gut.

The simulator shuts down around them and the exit pops open in the back. As they’re filing out, Ralter turns to Bodhi and says, “That weaving you did past the walkers and all, on the way out? That was wicked! I know I was supposed, uh, to have blood spurting out of me or something at the time,” he says, eyebrows flying up comically to disappear into the unkempt hair across his forehead, “but that was really cool.”

“Thanks,” Bodhi says, smiling because it’s hard not to when Ralter’s so enthusiastic. “Let’s hope it was what they’re looking for.”

“We’ll assess and send our notes to the med bay for your Chief’s sign off by first rotation tomorrow,” the flight officer with her datapad says, with a nod.

That night, Bodhi can’t fall asleep, tossing and turning so much that Jyn sits up in her own bed — he can only make her out as an indistinct triangular shadow in the darkness —  and asks flatly, “Can you lie still?” Then a moment later, when she’s merged back into a lump on her bed, “It’s already done now. There’s no use losing sleep.”

But in the morning, Bodhi’s eyes feel grainy from lack of sleep anyway — he’d fallen into a shallow, dream-infested doze from which he’d surfaced at several hour intervals before finally being woken once and for all by his alarm.

Chief Himghal calls Bodhi, Una, and Ilan all into xer office about twenty minutes into their rotation.

“For all the good it does us with only the one shuttle,” xe announces, immediately upon their entrance, “you have been flight cleared, Rook.”

Bodhi breathes out something that’s part gasp, part laugh, as Una throws her arms around him and gives him a smacking kiss on the cheek. “See,” she says, “I knew it!”

Ilan laughs and squeezes his upper arm affectionately.

“Yes, yes,” Himghal says, waving them towards the door. “It is good news. Now get back to work.”

* * *

The bubbling glee of getting his wings back, as buoyant as it is, remains tempered by other things. Cassian and Kaytoo have been gone for nearly six standard weeks and there’s been no news. Or no news that’s been allowed out beyond the closed circle of Intel’s upper ranks. Jyn tries anyway — wheedles and bullies and pokes at Cassian’s favorite young spies-in-the-making until they seem torn. But all they have to spill is how much they don’t know about the mission Cassian and Kay are on.

“Or maybe,” Jyn says tartly, “they’re lying. That is their job.”

“That may be so,” Chirrut agrees, “but I don’t believe they are lying to you about this.”

That’s actually sort of worse, Bodhi can’t help but think.

“Patience, little sister,” Baze counsels.  

Jyn isn’t the only one out of sorts. During their staff fighting lessons with Chirrut and Baze, Luke’s slower than usual to block Bodhi’s attacks and his footsteps are heavy, close to the ground. During breaks, he keeps pressing one end of his staff against against his forehead, between his eyebrows, like he’s warding off a headache he denies he has when Bodhi asks.

“What’s troubling you?” Chirrut finally asks one day, near the end of the hour, when they’re all sitting cross-legged on the training ground floor.

Luke looks down at his lap, lips thin. “I’ve been having nightmares,” he admits slowly.

“About battle? The Death Star?” Baze probes, eyebrows drawn together.

Bodhi frowns, waiting.

Luke bites his lip but shakes his head. “No. Well, sometimes, yeah, about getting shot down, or hearing other pilots get hit over the comms.” He pauses, then continues hesitantly. “But. Actually, they’re mostly about Alderaan. It feels like I saw it happen. Like I was watching from the Death Star. Ben said — ” his voice cracks, “Ben said it felt like voices crying out and being silenced. And I didn’t feel that then, but now in the dreams, it’s like it’s happening in my head and in front of my eyes at the same time and I can’t ever do anything to stop it.”

Baze looks over at Chirrut, his eyebrows knit.

Bodhi feels faintly nauseous at the images his imagination is tossing up. The bridge of the Death Star has never featured in his nightmares, and suddenly that seems like an unexpected reprieve from his brain.

“Has this ever happened to you before?” Baze asks.

Luke shakes his head immediately. “No,” he says and then frowns and bites his lip. “Well. Not like this. But I used to . . . sometimes, when I was younger, I’d dream about sandstorms before they happened. My aunt and uncle used to say it was a coincidence. That it was normal for kids to be afraid of sandstorms,” he murmurs. “But those weren’t about things that already happened. This, I don’t know how to explain it,” he says, the frustration evident in his voice. “But it feels like a memory, but like it doesn’t belong in my head, like it’s not _mine_.”

Chirrut taps his staff against the floor. “Perhaps,” he says finally, “we ought to start your lesson for today by considering how you might protect your mind.”

Bodhi takes that as his cue to leave. He ruffles Luke’s hair on his way out, because it makes Luke tip his head up and pointedly roll his eyes, a total contrast from the quiet, serious Luke who just confessed to nightmares that might not even be his own.

It’s on the back of his mind all day. Towards the end of rotation, once they’ve all dealt with their rounds, Una forces him and Ilan outside for a bit of physical labor, grinning as she says they ought to take advantage of this extra time and do some harvesting from the medicinal herb garden. They’ve got horticultural specialists for this actually, but they’re overburdened trying to beat back the native creeper vines from the agricultural fields. Maybe more importantly, Una loves this garden and Chief Himghal has a lot of thoughts about how pharmacology done right means knowing where active ingredients come from.

The sun and Chaladh One are high overhead. It is muggy hot and Bodhi’s sort of wishing his head was shaved still because his sweaty hair is sticking to the back of his neck.

“Ilan?” Bodhi asks, hesitantly. “Have you — have you ever heard of a human, uh, catching someone else’s night terrors? Like, I don’t know, maybe having them for someone else?”

Ilan frowns at him, bent down over a flowering plant, her lekku falling gently over her shoulders. “There might be cases among species with telepathic communication capabilities,” she says. “It’s not something I know much about. But with humans?” Ilan shakes her head. “I’ve never heard of it. People can certainly have very similar night terrors about the same thing, or the same event, though.”

“I don’t think that’s what’s happening,” Bodhi says, reaching down to pull the leaves from a jhen-jhen plant.

Ilan stands up properly, hands pressed against her lower back, and looks at Bodhi. “Well, medicine is never as stable as we’d like and it’s certainly never finished. Just because we aren’t familiar with any cases of it doesn’t mean it’s not possible.”

“Yeah,” Bodhi agrees. He’d been hoping for more, though he should have known better. Luke, for all that he’s friendly and well-liked and knowable, is also something else, mysterious to himself and to everyone else. “But how would you even treat something like that?”

“Start with what you know,” Ilan says. “Treat it like you would regular night terrors — look for the root cause, recommend adjustments to their sleep schedule. Ask them to talk about it.”

“Yeah,” Bodhi says, slowly. “Okay.”

“And Bodhi?” Ilan says. “Get them to come in, if it continues.”

Bodhi tries his best, prodding Luke gently the next evening. “I just think you should give it a shot.”

Luke scratches lightly at his wrist, looking down. “It’s not that I don’t like Dr. Medinara,” he says. “But it’s not really a medical problem, is it? If I’m having . . . _visions_ , or whatever.”

“Sleep deprivation’s a medical problem,” Bodhi counters, pressing his shoulder against Luke’s. “Night terrors are a medical problem. Look, I’m not going to pretend Ilan or anyone else in the med bay has some kind of instant fix, but you’ll never know how they might be able to help if you don’t even tell them what’s going on.”

Luke looks over at him sideways with his eyebrows pulled together slightly, but then he nods. “Okay,” he concedes with a hint of a smile. “I’ll go talk to her.”

* * *

It’s evening meal, a few days later, and Cassian and Kaytoo’s prolonged absence seems only underlined now that they’ve managed a night when Bodhi and Jyn’s rotation schedules actually match up with Chirrut and Baze’s.

In the middle of their meal, one of Cassian’s serious-faced young Intelligence proteges, Lieutenant Singing Waters, comes up to them. She appears, as she’s prone to, from seemingly nowhere. Bodhi always thinks she looks like she just stepped out of a painting, with her high cheekbones and the unrelenting neatness of her head scarves. She’s human, was born and raised in some religious city-state on Chalacta. She clears her throat at them all, like requesting a discreet audience.

“Lieutenant,” Jyn says, eyebrows slightly raised. It is a bit odd, Bodhi supposes. Singing Waters is excruciatingly polite and has, perhaps for that reason, taken to strategic avoidance of Jyn’s interrogations. She has a remarkable ability to melt away into crowds the moment any of them spots her. It’s frustrating and probably also why Cassian’s so fond of her.  

“Come, Lieutenant,” Chirrut says, patting the empty space on the bench besides him, “there’s no need to stand and hover. Sit, share our meal.”

“You are gracious, Honored,” Singing Waters says, sitting down a little stiffly.  

“I must ask you not to be so formal,” Baze says. “It will go to his head to be called ‘honored’ so much.”

Abruptly, Singing Waters bursts into a grin. “Certainly,” she agrees. “If it will not be an insult.”

“How could I be insulted by someone as polite as you when I have him around?” Chirrut asks.

Singing Waters nods and manages to school her features into something less amused.

“I have news,” she says, biting her lip. “It is not much. But it is . . . good. Major Andor and Kaytoo Ess Oh return. They should arrive within the next few days. I cannot be more specific than that.”

“You’ve given us a great deal by telling us that,” Chirrut answers for all of them.

“I know they have been off personal comms since leaving,” Singing Waters continues, a small frown line between her brows. “So I decided I should inform you all. That they are safe, en route back to us with trusted allies. It is,” she sets her mouth in a tight line, “what we try to do for . . . kin, yes? This is the word in Basic?”

“Yeah,” Bodhi agrees, clearing his throat. “That’s right.”

“Thank you,” Jyn says.

Singing Waters nods, briefly, and rises again.

That night, there’s no tossing and turning for either of them in their room — when Bodhi’s alarm goes off, Jyn just pulls her pillow over her head and turns over.

Two days later, in the evening as Bodhi and Jyn are headed back to their quarters, Singing Waters comes around the corner, startlingly quiet, and says, “Landing bay two, fifteen minutes.”

Bodhi’s just confused by this contextless announcement for a second, but Jyn snaps into motion, grabbing Bodhi’s wrist and nodding at Singing Waters.

“What —” Bodhi starts as Jyn tugs him down the corridor in the opposite direct of their quarters. Jyn glances back at him, impatient, and it all clicks. “Oh. _Oh._ ”

They head by Chirrut and Baze’s quarters and come not-quite-running into landing bay two just in time to see a small passenger ship land — several people Bodhi doesn’t recognize come off the shuttle, emerging into the low light. They’re met by Mon Mothma, spine straight, head lifted. Her pale hands are held out and a stoop-backed Mon Calamari takes them in her own. Mothma’s eyes hold closed for one long moment before she smiles and gestures towards the Command Center. She leads them off, speaking in hushed tones Bodhi can’t catch.  

Bodhi spares a fraction of moment to wonder who they might be when suddenly Kaytoo emerges and a half a step behind him —

“Cassian!” Jyn calls out, already in motion. She speeds towards him, but then stops short just in front of him and nods. Bodhi wonders for a split second if she’s going to stick out her hand for a handshake or something else incongruously formal. But instead Cassian reaches out and pulls her into a tight hug, his face hidden in her hair.

“Well then,” Kaytoo says, with expressionless surprise as he skirts around the embrace down the rest of the gangplank. Bodhi barely represses his laughter.  

“My friend,” Baze says, bowing his head slightly to Kaytoo, who returns the gesture with an equal respectful solemnity — Bodhi’s never seen Kay do that for anyone else. “It is good to see you returned.”

“Yes, I much prefer this to being shot at,” Kay agrees. Chirrut grins in response.

Bodhi immediately glances over Kay’s frame over evidence of damage, not that he’d be much use fixing it, and then darts his eyes over to Cassian, still caught in Jyn’s embrace. If he’s hurt, it’s hard to tell.

“I hope that despite your journey, you’ve both remained well,” Chirrut says.

Kaytoo replies, “As you can see, we have returned unharmed.”

None of them asks what it was that Cassian and Kay were out doing there, for long weeks.

* * *

Two weeks later, Jyn gets sent out on an off-planet mission of her own, but it’s a short one. And this time she’s accompanied by Exeter Squadron.

They come back with a small fleet of stolen shuttles.

Bodhi manages a glance at them when he goes down to the shore for dawn prayers. Even though the half-closed hangar bay door leaves the shuttles covered in shadows, Bodhi’s still itchy under the skin from covetousness, like he’s fifteen and ogling some rich merchant’s speeder blowing through Zhangsun Plaza.

He’s not the only one enthusiastic about them it turns out, because when he heads into the mess hall for his morning meal, that’s what everyone at his, Jyn, and Cassian’s usual table is talking about.

“You oughtta see the hyperdrives on them,” Luke says, his eyes lit up. “They’re beautiful.”

“Yeah, it’s amazing, they’re probably gonna be the newest things we’ve got right now!” Dak Ralter adds, almost bouncing in his seat. “The model’s only a couple years old. I mean, they’ve all taken some hits and I guess they’re gonna need some real work, but shit, they’re _fast_.”

“But who’re they for?” Bodhi prods Jyn. A cartwheeling hope is caught in his chest and there’s no use trying to bury it.

Jyn shrugs. “No idea. They don’t tell me that kind of thing. But whoever they are, they’re lucky. I’ve got a good feeling about those ships.”

“You have a good feeling about them because you stole them,” Cassian says, wearing a badly-suppressed smile.

“Maybe,” Jyn says, grinning back. “Or maybe that’s an auspicious set of shuttles we brought back.”

Bodhi spends the spare moments of rotation with his fingers drumming against the desk, his datapad, tapping his stylus lightly against his chin without thinking during his anatomy lesson with Yalthai, until she clears her throat quietly.

At the end of rotation, Bodhi’s comm beeps — the Chief wants him, Una, and Ilan in xer office.

“For once,” Chief Himghal announces the moment they’ve entered, “I have good news to share with you all. I’m sure you’ve heard about the new shuttles that have been . . . acquired. One of them will for the med bay’s use.”

Bodhi bites his lower lip against the abrupt laugh that wants to bubble its way up his throat.

“A shuttle of our own?” Una asks, eyes wide and excited.

“And we’ll be able to refit it to emergency response specifications?” Ilan immediately follows up.

“Yes and yes,” Himghal grins, flashing xer fangs. “No questions from you, Rook?”

Bodhi nods, feeling a little short of breath. “Can we see it?”

“You’re off rotation,” Himghal says with an overly casual shrug. “I see no reason you shouldn’t take a little walk, to see, ah, what is it?” xe consults xer datapad. “Heron Base shuttle sixteen, in landing bay three. Make a list of necessary repairs and refitting while you’re at it.”

“Understood. Chief,” Ilan says, with a brisk nod.

“Sir,” Bodhi says, echoing the nod, with Una chorusing in a second behind him. Almost before he’s done, he’s turning around, halfway out the door, one hand reaching out behind him. Una grabs it and then they’re almost running, skidding around the corner of the hallway.

“You’re like children with gifts waiting,” Ilan laughs from somewhere behind them but her footsteps speed up too.

The shuttle’s beautiful — small and sleek and admittedly beat-up. A Sullustan design, and Ralter was right — only a few years old, and durable. Bodhi used to keep up with the new models, remembers this one. It’s better in person. Just looking at her, Bodhi’s already a little breathless in love. Once he’s completed a circle around the outside, he follows Ilan and Una up the ramp inside.

“You take it,” Ilan says to him, nodding at the pilot’s seat and Una winks, throwing herself down into the seat behind the pilot’s.

“What’s her name going to be?” Bodhi asks, soft, reaching out to hover his fingers over the controls.

“That’s up to us,” Ilan replies.

Una claps her hands together. “I still can’t believe it’s actually _here_. And it’s ours.”

“Asclepius,” Bodhi says, stroking a finger over a dial. “That’s what we should call her.”

Behind him, Una makes a noise in the back of her throat and then she’s up, linking her arms around Bodhi’s shoulders. “I like that,” she says, pressing a kiss to the top of his head.

Ilan smiles at them both, her frown lines melting away, replaced instead by the fainter lines around her eyes. She nods. “It fits,” she says. “Now, come on,” she gestures to them impatiently. “We need to do this properly, make a list of repairs and adjustments for the mechanics.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Faiz Ahmed Faiz's "[You Tell Us What to Do."](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/you-tell-us-what-do)
> 
> Updates are likely to be pretty sporadic and spread out but I promise I will do my best to finish!


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